Adapting philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and *The Matrix Trilogy* 9781847792822

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Good example, bad philosophy
Adapting philosophy/ philosophy as adaptation
Mirrors and screens
Codes
Beyond nihilism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Adapting philosophy

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Adapting philosophy Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy

catherine constable

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Catherine Constable 2009 The right of Catherine Constable to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn  978 0 7190 7531 5  hardback isbn  978 0 7190 7532 2  paperback First published 2009 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Arno by Koinonia, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

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For my daughter, Iona, ‘You are my sunshine’.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

page ix 1

1 Good example, bad philosophy

10

2 Adapting philosophy/philosophy as adaptation

41

3 Mirrors and screens

69

4 Codes

96

5 Beyond nihilism

126

Conclusion

149

Bibliography Index

167 175

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Chas Critcher and the Film, Media and Communications Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam ­University for financing the first period of study leave that enabled me to formulate the proposal for this book and to write two ­articles on Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy. I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and ­Sheffield Hallam University for jointly financing the second, lengthier period of study leave, necessary to produce a book on the topic. My friends and former colleagues from Sheffield Hallam University were extremely good about shouldering the extra burden of work caused by my leave without complaining too much! I am particularly indebted to: Gerry Coubro, Sheldon Hall, Shelley O’Brien, Suzanne Boujada, Suzanne Speidel and Tom Ryall and would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for their support and to say how much I miss having them around. During the course of writing on The Matrix Trilogy, I have had the opportunity of presenting papers in a wide variety of different venues, including three very stimulating conferences: Screen, Literature on Screen and Philosophy & Film/Film & Philosophy. The second was crucial to the development of the book in that Kamilla Elliott’s helpful advice enabled me to begin to formulate a key line of argument. The third conference was tremendous fun (thank you Greg Tuck and Havi Carel), which is just as well as it resulted in my having to rethink my conclusion. It also brought about the opportunity to meet Tom Wartenberg whom I must thank for a most interesting email correspondence. Any book is always a project that embroils friends and family.

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x  Acknowledgements

As usual I cannot imagine writing this without the helpful encouragement of Rachel Jones who has now developed a summary of my position that is much clearer than my own! My understanding and appreciation of adaptation theory has been greatly enhanced by innumerable, stimulating conversations with Suzanne Speidel. I am also indebted to Richard Dyer for his wonderfully sustaining ­enthusiasm – indeed his support has been absolutely crucial to the development of the project into the final form. The clarity and precision of the final form is largely due to Jane Worrall’s meticulous proof reading and bibliographic skills. Finally, I must thank my husband, David Wood, for shouldering more than his share of domestic duties and still being willing to proof read in the evenings and must take this opportunity of putting in print that he is, ­officially, a gem.

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Introduction

T

he extensive literature on the philosophical aspects of The Matrix Trilogy perpetuates a number of highly problematic models for inter-relating philosophy and film texts. A great many of these articles are written by philosophers and do not draw on the literature that is available in the comparatively new interdisciplinary field of Film-Philosophy.1 As a result, the majority treat the trilogy as a beginner’s guide to philosophy, positioning the films in two ways: positively, as useful examples that make the theories accessible; or negatively, as misinterpretations/distortions of the philosophical sources.2 Importantly, viewing the films as mere ­illustrations or bad copies of their philosophical sources makes it quite impossible to ask a crucial question, namely: what is the philosophical project of the films themselves? Providing an answer to this question gives the book a two-fold purpose. Firstly, addressing the issue of the films’ own project requires the delineation of a new methodology for inter-relating philosophical and filmic texts. Secondly, this methodology will be put into practice through a detailed assessment of the ways in which the trilogy takes up and metamorphoses Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. I have chosen to focus on this particular text because it is the only work of philosophy that the Wachowski brothers recommended as required reading for cast members, thus giving it a privileged status above the films’ other philosophical source material.3 It is the also the only philosophical work to have an on-screen role in the trilogy – famously appearing as the hiding place for Neo’s virtual reality contraband in the first film. Lastly, Baudrillard’s own widely publicised condemnation of the trilogy

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2  Adapting philosophy

for misrepresenting his work has had the unfortunate effect of closing down debate,4 marking the reinstatement of a highly questionable model in which film texts merely function as bad copies of their illustrious philosophical sources. Much of the writing on The Matrix Trilogy operates with the tacit assumption that philosophy and film have very little in common. Philosophy is typically defined as logical, reasoned argument; conversely the feature film is a form of light entertainment. The suggestion that film might be philosophical becomes even more problematic when the films in question are a series of hugely successful blockbusters. The Matrix cost 63 million dollars to make and netted 171 million in the United States and 456 million worldwide. While the sequels were more expensive, costing 300 million dollars to make, the total worldwide sales of the trilogy are estimated at 1.5 billion dollars so far.5 The blockbuster ensures its mass appeal by offering easily accessible narratives to a youthful target audience of adolescent males. Such films tend to be regarded as visceral rather than conceptual, roller coasters of fights, fires and explosions prefiguring the computer games and amusement park rides that they will become. Typically, the blockbuster uses such marketing tie-ins as a significant source of income generation. William Merrin draws attention to the ways in which the ‘aestheticised hypercool noir’ of The Matrix becomes a form of advertising that displaces the heroes of the narrative.6 ‘Arguably the stars of the film are not Neo and Morpheus but their clip-on shades, leather coats … and mobile phones.’7 Importantly, the visceral pleasures offered by the blockbuster would appear to be the antithesis of the detached reflection that defines philosophical writing, thus setting up a series of clear oppositions between film/philosophy, body/ mind, pleasure/logic and emotion/reason. These oppositions are consolidated by the blockbuster’s undeniable status as the epitome of capitalist excess. The promotion of consumption via product placement is part of a life-style that is entirely at odds with the ascetic emphasis on transcending the every-day that is said to characterise much of Western philosophy. The most famous, albeit extreme, example is Socrates who willingly embraces death rather than continuing to live within the mutable, transient, physical world. This underpins a conception

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Introduction  3

of ­philosophy as a form of critical reflection that rises above the ephemeral distractions of the day to day. The outstanding economic success of The Matrix Trilogy also means that left-wing academics (still the majority within Arts subjects) will seek to demonstrate that it is intrinsically worthless. As a capitalist product par ­excellence the films are deemed to be necessarily incapable of conveying radical critique or even thoughtful insight. Elie During’s comic aside reflects the problems facing serious academics who deign to write on the trilogy. ‘Most intellectuals would probably have condoned a semi-ironic reading of an unknown Taiwanese B grade film, but to dare to speak seriously of a blockbuster … was probably asking a bit too much of them.’8 The blockbuster’s lack of intellectual cachet ensures that much of the academic writing on the trilogy is marked by ambivalence. Stefan Herbrechter comments on the distinctive tonality of the writing in his introduction to The Matrix in Theory, arguing that it is the consequence of academic misgivings about the critical/ theoretical validity of low cultural forms. Significantly some kind of uneasiness quickly surfaces in most contributions to the debate. For some it may still be a question of ‘serious’ academics having to be apologetic about delving into ‘low’ popular culture and indulging in some form of compromising … ‘pleasure’. For others it might just be even more evidence of (cultural) theory’s or (cultural) studies’ weakness to take blockbuster culture … too seriously. How can ‘serious’ thinkers, even philosophers, sink so low as to find their inspiration in facile, superficial and largely incoherent, eclectic mass media franchises?9

The final question is Herbrechter’s sarcastic send up of a position to which he and I do not subscribe. However, the remark is enlightening because it summarises a particular position in which philosophy is valorised as the highest of high culture. When written from this perspective, philosophical analyses of The Matrix Trilogy play across an extreme form of the opposition between high and low culture. The unresolved tensions set up recurring patterns of tonal shifts that feature in a great number of the articles: from embarrassment at having to address the films at all, to outbursts of vitriolic critique.

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4  Adapting philosophy

Importantly, the distinctive tonality of much of the philosophical writing on the trilogy immediately calls into question the standard definition of philosophy as detached, purely rational, discourse. If the vitriolic invective to which the films are subjected suggests that philosophy has its share of (unacknowledged) visceral pleasures, then the standard oppositions between film/philosophy, emotion/ reason cannot be regarded as secure. Such instability means that it is possible for a blockbuster to be both exciting and thought provoking – indeed for there to be such a thing as ‘an intellectual action movie’.10 This constitutes the starting point of the film analyses offered in later chapters. However, the purpose of chapters one and two is to set out the formidable range of arguments, prejudices and well-worn oppositions, which have to be challenged in order to begin to address the theoretical aspects of the films. While Herbrechter traces the largely unconscious impact of the opposition between high and low culture on analyses of the trilogy, the hierarchical division is explicitly utilised within numerous articles, privileging the philosophical approach/material over the films’ textual detail. Furthermore, the blockbuster’s unfortunate status as the lowest of low culture means that such writing on the trilogy is marked by the reemergence of two long-held prejudices about cinema. Firstly, the trilogy suffers from what Robert Stam describes as ‘a socialized form of guilt by association’ in which ‘cinema … is seen as degraded by the company it keeps – the great unwashed popular mass audience, with its lower-class origins in “vulgar” spectacles like sideshows and carnivals.’11 The blockbuster’s emphasis on excessive spectacle is often seen as a direct link to its vulgar noncinematic roots. The second prejudice arises from the equation of the mass audience with mass accessibility, fuelling the general assumption that ‘“it takes no brains to sit down and watch a film.”’12 Stam argues against this, stating simply: ‘This is rather like saying that it takes no brains to sit down and read a novel; what matters, in both cases is understanding what one sees or reads.’13 The unfortunate reemergence of these two prejudices in numerous articles results in a reworking of the opposition between film/philosophy as a division between two types of audience: the masses who lack cultural capital and the philosopher-critics who possess high levels of it. Importantly, this reinforces the ­assumption

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Introduction  5

that the latter have nothing to learn from the films. Very few of the philosophical analyses bother to engage with the rich, image-literate, textual detail of the trilogy in a systematic or rigorous way. Moreover, there is almost no engagement with any works from Film Studies – as though analysing a film was something automatic rather than, at the very least, a learned skill that can be done more or less well.14 The absence of references to key works from Film Studies is indicative of a lack of respect for the subject area, marking an entrenching of traditional academic hierarchies in which elder statesmen, such as philosophy, are privileged over young pretenders. This brief sketch of the hierarchies, general prejudices and assumptions that inform many of the articles on the trilogy is vital because it provides a backdrop for the debates to come. The possible relations between philosophy and film are constructed through the intersection of a series of binary oppositions, such as: intellectual/ visceral, academic/profit-making, high/low culture. Within this context, film is seen to have so little to offer that the inter-relation of the two areas takes place under conditions that are entirely set by philosophy. Most of the philosophical writing on the trilogy is not interdisciplinary and does not make use of the available literature in Film-Philosophy. It operates with the tacit assumption that philosophy is a universal form of meta-critique that can be applied without modification to any field. Recognising the unequal power relations between philosophy and film is vital to comprehending the very limited range of roles allocated to the films in much of the philosophical writing on the trilogy. The limited range of roles offered to the films is fully explored in chapter one, which offers a meta-critical overview of philosophical writing on The Matrix Trilogy. The treatment of the films as introductions or illustrations can be seen to utilise models drawn from adaptation theory. Importantly, much of the writing on the philosophical aspects of the films utilises the criterion of fidelity to the original source. It is particularly prevalent in the analysis of the trilogy’s use of Baudrillard, reducing any departure from the source to a misrepresentation of his work. The problems arising from the criterion of fidelity itself are also addressed. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the more positive models of the trilogy as a form of philosophy, which have been created by

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6  Adapting philosophy

theorists in Film-Philosophy: Christopher Falzon and Thomas Wartenberg.15 However, the philosophical aspect of the films is largely said to reside in its audience effects – provoking people to thought – leaving the question of the trilogy’s own philosophical project still unanswered. Chapter two sets up the methodology for answering the question. This involves challenging the dominant binary hierarchies of reason/emotion and intellectual/visceral that make it impossible to envisage such a thing as a philosophical film. The binaries are shown to have their basis in the philosophical opposition between word and image. This gains a new lease of life in adaptation theory where the literary word is seen to be conceptual and symbolic, while the filmic image is defined as perceptual and largely literal. The argument that films can be philosophical is two-fold. Firstly, the chapter utilises the work of Kamilla Elliott in order to demonstrate that the filmic multitrack is capable of constructing complex visual, verbal and aural figures.16 This is combined with Michèle Le Doeuff ’s work on the conceptual role played by imagery within philosophy.17 Thus the overall argument is that philosophy and film are profoundly linked through their reliance on symbolic figuration, additionally, the role of figures in the construction of concepts and arguments means that films – even blockbusters – can be ­philosophical. The next three chapters put the methodology delineated in chapter two into practice by offering detailed textual readings of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and The Matrix Trilogy. The analysis of the philosophical text unpicks the complex symbolism of the figures that feature in the writing, explaining their significance in the development of specific concepts and arguments. The verbal figures will be compared with the filmic figures and the detailed readings of the trilogy will address all the potentially intersecting elements of film’s visual, verbal and aural multitrack. The analyses note key points of divergence from the source text. Unlike standard fidelity criticism where divergence is regarded as an unforgivable distortion of the original, departures from the source are viewed as the starting points of the trilogy’s own philosophical project. This is indicated by the use of the term ‘take up’ throughout the book, for example The Matrix Trilogy’s take up of Baudrillard, to indicate an active engagement that encompasses borrowing, adapting and

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Introduction  7

changing source material. The methodology draws on aspects of Elliott’s conception of adaptation as a form of metamorphosis.18 The analyses also trace the ways in which the changes to the source can be pieced together, thereby creating a different philosophical position. Chapters three and four address specific recurring figures and their associated arguments from Simulacra and Simulation, before focusing on the ways in which they are taken up and altered across the trilogy. Chapter three examines the complex construction of key objects, specifically mirrors and television/computer screens, in Baudrillard’s work and their reformulation in The Matrix. It also addresses the re-emergence of the word/image dichotomy in philosophical analyses of the first film and its impact on the reading of narrative and character. Chapter four focuses on Baudrillard’s concept of ‘the code’, which combines elements of digital and genetic coding. The chapter addresses the three key roles allocated to the code. It is said to constitute: a unifying underlying substance, a form of serial duplication – such as cloning, and a deterministic model of technical/biological pre-programming. The textual analy­ ­sis will show that of the trilogy it is The Matrix Reloaded that engages with all three conceptions of the code, revising its characteristics through a complex presentation of visual/verbal figures and multilayered forms of narrative. Chapter five examines Baudrillard’s famous, final chapter ‘On Nihilism’ in which the philosopher revisits his conception of the code as a pre-programmed system. The writing is dense and ambivalent, ostensibly overriding previous delineations of possible ways out of the system. The endeavour to piece together Baudrillard’s overall position is paralleled by an analysis of the trilogy’s changes to the source text and their contribution to the creation of a theoretical position that goes beyond nihilism. However, the films’ presentation of the possibility of systemic change does not involve the reinstatement of a transcendental model of heroic individualism. The solution retains elements of Baudrillardian postmodernism in that the hero remains embroiled within the system, constituted by the very code that he reworks. The Matrix Trilogy goes beyond ­Baudrillard in offering a conception of systemic change that is effected by new relations between the objects/­products of the

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8  Adapting philosophy

system itself, thereby creating a new vision of a possible and positive techno-future. The conclusion returns to a consideration of the methodology that has been developed and demonstrated across the book. The summary of the film reading is accompanied by a brief analysis of The Matrix Trilogy’s contribution to postmodern philosophy, positioning it alongside the work of Donna Haraway. While the trilogy’s philosophical position is postmodern, the conclusion will show that the reading strategies used to delineate it are not. This will be followed by an assessment of the differences between my methodology for inter-relating philosophical and filmic texts and two other approaches in the field of Film-Philosophy set up by Thomas Wartenberg and Stephen Mulhall.19 The delineation of key differences and points of resemblance will help to clarify my position, which draws on my previous work, Thinking in Images, to offer a model of philosophy as thought in figuration.20

Notes 1 E.g. T. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) and S. Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 2 E.g. C. Grau, (ed.) Philosophers Explore The Matrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), W. Irwin, (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 2002), W. Irwin, (ed.) More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 2005) and G. Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Matrix (Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2003). 3 A. Gordon, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur? Part II’ in Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill, pp. 102–23, p. 103. John Stratton reports that the Wachowskis gave Keanu Reeves three books to read: Simulacra and Simulation, Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control and Dylan Evans’ Introducing Evolutionary Psychology. J. Stratton, ‘So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999: looking forward to The Matrix’, in M. Diocaretz and S. Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 27–52, p. 31, fn. 2. 4 J. Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Jean Baudrillard’, trans. G. Genosko and A. Bryx, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 12 (2004) www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/genosko.htm (accessed on 12/3/07). 5 Stratton, ‘So tonight I’m gonna party …’ , in Diocartez and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, pp. 27–8.

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Introduction  9 6 W. Merrin, Baudrillard and The Media: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) p. 116. 7 Ibid., p. 123. 8 Elie During, ‘Is there an exit from “virtual reality”? Grid and network – from Tron to The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, pp. 131–50, p. 132. 9 S. Herbrechter, ‘Introduction: theory in The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, pp. 7–23, p. 7. My italics. 10 Interview with Larry Wachowski quoted in A. Gordon, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur? part II’, in Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill, p. 103. 11 Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, in Stam and Raengo (eds) Literature and Film , p. 7. 12 Ibid., the quotation is from one of Stam’s literature professors! 13 Ibid., p. 7. Italics mine. 14 Even David Bordwell’s minimal and hostile definition of textual analysis as the product of ‘craft-like’ routines reflects its status as a learned skill. D. Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1989) p. 7. 15 T. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened: experiencing The Matrix’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, (27) 2003, 139–52. C. Falzon, ‘Philosophy and The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, pp. 97–112. 16 K. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 17 This builds on my previous work on Le Doeuff, in C. Constable, Thinking in Images: Film Theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich (London: British Film Institute, 2005) pp. 29–37, 50–1; and C. Constable, ‘Baudrillard reloaded: interrelating philosophy and film via The Matrix Trilogy’, Screen, 47:2, (summer 2006), pp. 233–8, 249. 18 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 229–30. 19 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) and Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.). 20 Constable, Thinking in Images.

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1

Good example, bad philosophy

T

he first part of this chapter will offer a meta-critical analysis of the extensive literature on the philosophical aspects of The Matrix Trilogy, exploring the theoretical assumptions that underpin general conceptions of the ways philosophical and filmic texts can be inter-related. The majority of the writing on the trilogy presents the films as introductions to philosophy, setting out a twotier model in which the films are compared and contrasted with their more eminent primary sources. Importantly, this chapter will demonstrate that these general conceptions of the inter-relation between the trilogy and its philosophical sources unwittingly replicate well-worn arguments from adaptation theory, specifically the criterion of fidelity to the original work. Much of the writing on the trilogy offers the films one of two options: to be celebrated as accurate albeit derivative, or castigated for misrepresenting the original sources: good example or bad philosophy. Discussions of the ways in which the trilogy takes up Jean Baudrillard’s work have been dominated by the question of fidelity to the ‘original’ source, usually Simulacra and Simulation. This situation is further complicated and, from a film theorist’s perspective, considerably worsened by Baudrillard’s own contribution to the debate in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur.1 The interview has had a profoundly negative impact on later assessments of the trilogy’s use of his work. However, Baudrillard’s rather surprising use of the fidelity model highlights a number of its problems. The final part of the chapter will address the work of two key theorists: Thomas Wartenberg and Christopher Falzon, whose exchanges offer a detailed discussion of the ways in which philosophical and

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Good example, bad philosophy  11

filmic texts might be inter-related.2 However, the ostensibly positive roles they offer the films will be shown to be intrinsically limited. This chapter will demonstrate that none of the current approaches provides the means to answer a simple question, namely ‘what is the philosophical project of the films themselves?’ The dominant model for inter-relating philosophical and filmic texts offered by work on the trilogy presents the films as introductions to great works of philosophy. The value of the trilogy thus lies in its ‘assimilation to a higher educative goal’.3 William Irwin’s introduction to his second edited volume, More Matrix and Philosophy, makes this clear: ‘the aim of this book is the same as the original … to bring the reader from popular culture to philosophy.’4 The first essay in the volume by Lou Marinoff offers a key metaphor: ‘The Matrix … is a bridge to philosophical culture. Insofar as it motivates students to read Plato and Descartes (among many other philo­ sophers) it serves a worthwhile educational purpose.’5 The same pedagogic premise clearly underpins Chris Grau’s Philosophers Explore The Matrix, a collection of essays drawn from the official website.6 The structure of the book makes the transition to reading great works of philosophy even easier, the final section consists of key extracts from classic texts including: Plato’s Republic, Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Berkeley’s Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. The use of the trilogy as a means of promoting philosophy parallels arguments praising novel to film adaptations as study aids or advertisements for the ‘original’ works, whose key pedagogic function is to ‘send viewers to the book’.7 In both cases the films act as a bridge to/from a philosophical/literary original that is simultaneously positioned as final goal and formative source. Sarah Cardwell notes that within adaptation theory such arguments protect the status of the literary original through a return to the criterion of fidelity. ‘The educational usefulness of classic-novel adaptations depends upon the adaptations’ fidelity to their source novels (upon “advertising standards”) and upon the role of adaptations in conveying the story, ideas, themes and opinions of the author’.8 In the case of philosophical texts, the films are judged in terms of key metaphors, stories and themes that are crucial to the construction of the philosopher’s overall position, for example Plato’s myth of the

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12  Adapting philosophy

cave from the Republic. The films are either praised for presenting the philosophy accurately or castigated for daring to depart from the source material thereby distorting the original. Cardwell argues that much of the early work on novel to film adaptation was done within literature departments who naturally sought to ‘validate and valorise literary art over audio-visual arts’, thereby protecting the status of their subject area.9 In the same way, the presentation of The Matrix Trilogy as an introduction to philo­ sophy keeps the traditional hierarchies firmly intact. The pedagogic value of the films lies in their assimilation to a properly intellectual subject area.10 Even though the trilogy is ostensibly lauded as exceptional and typically contrasted with ‘standard Hollywood fare’11 it is only deemed worthy of a transitional role. Importantly, these attempts to justify the value of film via its assimilation to a higher pedagogic purpose actually downgrade the filmic in favour of the one truly educative medium, the written word, as exemplified by great works of literature and philosophy. Grau argues that the essays in his volume are of two types: those that position the trilogy as a bridge, tracing the connections between the questions raised by the films and the works of great philosophers; and those that use the films ‘as a springboard for discussing their own original philosophical views.’12 Both options present the films as a stepping-stone on the route to philosophy; however, they set up rather different conceptions of the final goal. In the first, philosophy is defined in the same way as literature, as a subject area constructed around a canon of great works, which sustains the introduction of the criterion of fidelity. In the second, philosophy is envisaged as a process, a way of addressing key issues that utilises the techniques of logical argument. Wartenberg notes the assumption that ‘argument is the central method of philosophic discourse’ has general acceptance within philosophy.13 From this perspective, any introduction to the subject area should function as a guide to the creation of logical critique. Examples abound of the use of the trilogy as a springboard for issue-driven discussions, and popular topics include the nature of scepticism and the problems of free will and determinism. The majority of the articles contain few references to the films, which are simply cited at the beginning, forming a prologue for the coming

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Good example, bad philosophy  13

debates.14 Gregory Bassham’s discussion of religious pluralism does at least begin with a detailed textual analysis of the many Christian references in The Matrix, reading Neo as ‘the one’, a Messianic figure who brings the hope of new life for himself and others.15 This is followed by a brief tracing of the ways in which the first film also adopts the Buddhist view of the empty/illusory nature of reality as well as the Hindu mythology of reincarnation.16 Bassham outlines four possible forms of religious pluralism arguing that The Matrix conforms to the third, ‘Cafeteria pluralism: the view that religious truth lies in a mix of beliefs drawn from many different religions’.17 Renaming this position ‘Neo-pluralism’ in honour of the film, Bassham immediately subjects it to critique arguing that it suffers from two key problems: firstly, the pick and mix approach to world religions results in an incoherent ‘collage of religious beliefs’18 and secondly, there is no clear way in which any of them could be verified as true.19 Incoherent and impossible to verify, Neo-pluralism is quite clearly designated as bad philosophy. Interestingly, positioning the films as an introduction to the process of philosophising creates new standards by which they can be judged to fail. Instead of being castigated for misrepresenting great works of philosophy, they can now be criticised for offering unconvincing forms of argument. Bassham goes further, setting out a series of oppositions in which the fashionable epitome of café culture, Neo-pluralism, is contrasted with the logical, commonsensical nature of true philosophy.20 Superficial, nonsensical and logically indefensible, Neo-pluralism is firmly placed outside the boundaries of philosophy. Instead it is said to constitute ‘the religion of The Matrix’ ultimately acting as an example of ‘art or contemporary myth making’.21 The presentation of the films as a guide to the process of philosophising can take the more specific form of providing an introduction to the Socratic method of teaching philosophy via a process of question and answer. In Plato’s dialogues Socrates takes the role of an allegedly uninformed questioner, pursuing each line of enquiry until the interlocutor admits that they too do not know the answer, which is termed the point of aporia. Interestingly, the Wachowski brothers’ introduction to the 2004 DVD boxed set, The Ultimate Matrix Collection, references this conception of philosophising as a

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process of asking questions. ‘It was our sincerest hope that our movies might inspire or perhaps provoke a little Socratic interaction, something beyond, “Remember that one part? That was cool”.’22 Each film in the boxed set also has a philosophical commentary, featuring Ken Wilber and Dr Cornel West, the latter enumerating the moments that generate Socratic questioning. Moreover, the contrast between the positive philosophical commentary and the negative nature of the critical commentary is intended to provoke further thought. The presentation of conflicting views has a highly individualistic purpose: following the Oracle’s advice, the Wachowski brothers aim to inspire viewers to ‘“make up their own damn mind.”’23 Philosophical writing on the trilogy has noted the importance of questions and questioning within the texts. Paraphrases of key lines, such as Trinity’s ‘it’s the question that brought you here’ abound.24 However, most depart significantly from the film-centred, individualistic model of ‘Socratic interaction’ offered by the Wachowskis. The films are not seen to pose new questions but rather to raise ‘the same philosophical questions as … great works of literature.’25 Moreover, the metaphors deployed in the philosophical writing construct the films as vehicles for getting to philosophical questions. Erion and Smith argue that ‘Matrix-like scenarios’ can act as ‘useful tools for exploring fundamental questions about knowledge and reality.’26 The quote sets up a clear division between the pragmatic means, found in philosophical and filmic texts, and profound ends, the fundamental questions that are only posed by great works of philosophy. Matt Lawrence constructs the trilogy as a lens that serves to bring key questions ‘into focus’.27 He provides a list subdivided into appropriate philosophical headings, thus ‘What is Real?’ appears under Metaphysics and ‘What is good?’ under Ethics.28 This account clearly suggests that philosophy poses universal, eternal questions: ‘The films bring them into focus, but the questions have always been with us.’29 Importantly, the metaphors of the tools and the lens mean that the films are not seen to provoke individualistic attempts to ask questions/create answers, but rather to offer a means of accessing the right questions and answers, which are set out by great works of philosophy. It is necessary to unpick the key metaphors offered in the ­articles on the trilogy because very few philosophers, with the notable

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exception of Thomas Wartenberg, devote any space to explicitly addressing the problems of inter-relating philosophy and film. Wartenberg begins by setting out the ‘most straightforward way in which philosophy and film can intersect: when a film illustrates a philosophic claim or theory’, before going on to demonstrate convincingly that the model has a number of complex pitfalls.30 The chief advantage of the illustration model is its clarity: philo­ sophy is taken ‘as a given, something we are all supposed to understand’, and film is allocated ‘a completely unambiguous role.’31 This differs slightly from the conception of the trilogy as a bridge to great works in that the films can act as an illustration of particular claims or ideas, as well as retelling stories or themes that are crucial to the construction of the philosopher’s whole position. However, the model clearly suffers from the same time-loop paradox as the presentation of the films as a bridge to/from canonical works. Film is allocated the unambiguous yet paradoxical role of ‘illustrating the philosophic idea that is presupposed as the philosophic target of the film.’32 The illustrative model also shares two further problems: the absolute reliance on the criterion of fidelity, which, in turn, means that any changes to the philosophical writing are simply seen as distortion. While the criterion of fidelity often emerges as the unacknowledged assumption dominating the interlinking of philosophy and film, some philosophers have made it explicit. Mary Litch’s book, Philosophy Through Film, presents the films as adaptations of particular philosophical works. The volume is divided into chapters on key philosophical issues; each includes: a general introduction, an extract from a key text or texts, and a discussion of the selected films. Readers are advised to address the first two sections before viewing the films in order to appreciate the level of fidelity displayed by the adaptations: ‘you will be surprised by how closely the plots and dialogue of the … movies stick to their philosophical script.’33 The Matrix appears in the first chapter on scepticism, following an extract from Descartes’ Meditations in which the philosopher begins to doubt the existence of the external, physical world. Most famously, Descartes comments that he has believed himself to be awake only to discover that he was dreaming, leading him to doubt the validity of his sensory experiences. Litch argues that The Matrix

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initially blurs the boundaries between reality and dreaming, only to depart completely from Cartesian scepticism once Neo awakens in the real world of the vats.34 The film’s failure to act as a faithful adaptation means that the role is handed to Total Recall, which is seen to be properly Cartesian in its continual blurring of the boundaries between the real and dream worlds.35 Importantly, most of the writing on Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy treats the films as adaptations of a philosophical original, usually Simulacra and Simulation. While Rebecca Simpkins’ article begins with a direct and extravagant claim to which few philosophers would ever commit themselves, she sums up the prevailing assumptions underlying much of the writing. ‘In The Matrix screenwriterdirectors Larry and Andy Wachowski visually communicate Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern theories in a work that moves through “The Precession of Simulacra” almost line by line’.36 Simpkins’ assertion captures the pivotal role allocated to the first essay in Simulacra and Simulation in many of the internet articles.37 Moreover, writing on Baudrillard and The Matrix is dominated by the question of whether the film really constitutes a properly faithful adaptation. It forms the cornerstone of the influential debate between Dino Felluga and Andrew Gordon that appeared in one of the first edited collections. Felluga offers a complex and positive reading of the film, tracing ‘the ways in which the Wachowskis try to stay faithful to aspects of Baudrillard’s theories, even when they appear to contradict them’;38 whereas Gordon argues that the film simply ‘waters … down’ Baudrillard’s work to the point whereby it ‘is not faithful to [his] conclusions’.39 Despite their opposing readings, the language of fidelity deployed in both articles highlights their common criterion for judging The Matrix as a good/bad adaptation respectively. Yeffeth’s decision to position Felluga before Gordon, even though the former offers an argument that complicates the latter’s position, clearly privileges Gordon’s conclusions. In this way, the Yeffeth volume plays a significant role in anticipating and actualising the dominant view of The Matrix as an unfaithful adaptation that misrepresents Baudrillard’s philosophical position. The key issue in most readings of the first film as an adaptation is whether it offers an accurate depiction of Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal. Baudrillard’s famous analysis of four phases of

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r­ elations between the image and reality is set out at the beginning of ‘The Precession of Simulacra’.40 In the first phase, the image ‘is the reflection of a profound reality’ it takes the form of a good copy like a portrait that resembles the sitter.41 In the second, the image ‘masks and denatures a profound reality’ becoming a bad copy, like the blasphemous graven images that are banned for misrepresenting the ineffable nature of God.42 This phase can also be ­paralleled with ideology – the image representing the state-sanctioned, palatable lies that cover over the profound truth of economic inequalities. The decisive break comes in the third phase where the image ‘masks the absence of a profound reality’ for it marks the ­‘transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing’.43 Baudrillard gives the example of Disneyland – a fantastical, childish world that ‘is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real’.44 Disneyland sets up false oppositions between imaginary/real, childish/adult thereby regenerating the concept of the real in order to cover over its ultimate absence. The third phase is intimately linked to the fourth, in that it ushers in the moment at which the absence of the real is recognised: ‘Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland’.45 The recognition that it is America itself that is ‘Disneyfied’ shows the interpenetration of the real by the image. Moreover, the real is judged to resemble a cartoon reversing the normal order of the relation between reality and its image/copy set out in phases one and two. The precession of simulacra, such as films, advertising and other models, turns the real into a copy of the image simultaneously abolishing the concept of an unmediated, objective, immediate reality. Thus, in this final, fourth phase the image ‘has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.’46 Importantly, the primacy of the image obliterates the real, creating the always already fictionalised, image-laden hyperreal. Gordon argues that the initial presentation of the matrix in the first film appears to correspond to the fourth phase of the image. The matrix constitutes a simulation that has ‘no relation to reality whatsoever. That is, the everyday world in which Neo exists is totally false, a dream world with no substance and no relation to 2199’.47 However, the use of intertextual references, specifically

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quotations from Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, is said to set up an opposition between the dream world of the matrix and the real world of the vats and the Nebuchadnezzar. The key difference is that Neo’s journey reverses the order of those undertaken by Alice/Dorothy – he begins in the dream world and then awakens to reality.48 Crucially for Gordon, this constitutes the point at which the film departs from Baudrillard’s fourth phase in that it offers the vision of a reality that exists beyond the hyperreal. In the same way, Russell Kilbourn reads Neo’s death/rebirth in the vat as ‘a negative instance of the reality principle’, arguing that it constitutes the point at which Baudrillardian simulation is abandoned in favour of the real.49 David Lavery picks a slightly later moment to mark the key transition from the hyperreal to the real. ‘In The Matrix we know very well where the “real” world is. After Neo’s body has been snatched from the sewer and hoisted into the Zionist hovercraft, Morpheus introduces him to it: “Welcome to the real world.”’50 Sven Lutzka continues to pursue this well-worn line of argument in his contribution to the most recent, in 2007, edited collection: The Matrix in Theory. His article clearly conforms to the dominant tradition in that he utilises the criterion of fidelity to castigate the film for failing accurately to depict the hyperreal.51 His criticisms echo those offered by Lavery. ‘Baudrillard’s analysis of American culture is at odds with the world represented in The Matrix for in the film we know very well where the “real” world is. It seems that even within the realm of Baudrillard’s “fourth order of simulacra”, the film can represent it and tell a heroic tale of the recovery of the real.’52 Moreover, Lutzka’s article is clearly influenced by Gordon’s critique. For Gordon, the film’s return to the real provides ‘a solution to the problem of simulation whereas Baudrillard believes there is none’, thus misrepresenting his conclusions.53 The changes also have the effect of altering the tonality of the original: ‘The Matrix … plays on Baudrillard’s ideas about simulation, but without Baudrillard’s pessimism’.54 Elsewhere in the article Gordon comments that the film is better seen as ‘postmodern pastiche’.55 This cue is taken up by Lutzka who argues that the film’s use of Baudrillard is better seen as bricolage: ‘the references to Baudrillard are only bits and pieces, lacking the profoundness of the original and leaving out its ultimate pessimism’.56

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Lacking the profundity, tonality, ideas and conclusions of the original, The Matrix is nothing more than eviscerated Baudrillard. Interestingly, the insults levelled at the film stress its status as an inauthentic copy of the philosophical original. Thus Gordon argues that the film displays ‘pseudo-profundity’;57 Knight and McKnight classify it as ‘an example of real genre, but only an instance of virtual philosophy’;58 while Ivan Callus describes the trilogy as tiresome, portentous and ‘“fauxbrow”’.59 The distinctive use of the language of the fake: pseudo, virtual, faux, actually sets up a significant parallel with the less than generous reception of Baudrillard’s work within analytic philosophy. The key theorist of simulation was characterised as, at best, a ‘high priest’ who offered his followers nothing more than a simulacrum of philosophy itself. As a result, the repeated use of the language of the bad copy to criticise the trilogy, actually suggests that the films are more faithful to their philosophical source than anyone suspected! More seriously, the take up of the criterion of fidelity as a key means of judging the films has a significant effect on the critical evaluation of the Baudrillardian source. Many of the analyses of the films’ take up of Baudrillard are written by people who are obviously inimical to his postmodern position. However, the uncritical adoption of the criterion of fidelity sets up a process of argument, a series of comparisons in which the film is automatically positioned as a bad copy, thereby fundamentally repositioning the Baudrillardian text as a genuine philosophical original. This process of re-evaluation is most notable in Gordon’s article. He begins by asserting that Baudrillard is not a philosopher, instead viewing him as a writer of exaggeratedly nihilistic science fiction.60 However, by the end the film is castigated for misrepresenting Baudrillard’s ‘ideas’ and ‘conclusions’, terms that serve to reposition him as a philosopher and moreover one who offers clear, reasoned arguments.61 In this way, the act of misrepresentation perpetrated by The Matrix actually serves to recreate Baudrillard as a writer of ‘real’ philosophy. In an inversion of causal logic that postmodern theorists, such as Baudrillard and Judith Butler, would be proud to sponsor – it is the bad copy that creates the concept of the original. David Detmer’s recent [2005] article on the trilogy remains one of the very few to avoid the beguilements of fidelity and thus to

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offer a properly logical argument. His initial critique of Baudrillard’s work as incomprehensible, incorrectly referenced and full of implausible, poorly argued assertions,62 is followed by an entirely positive analysis of the moments in which the trilogy departs from its despised source.63 He argues that the thesis of the films is that ‘images mask reality’, following Gordon, Lavery and others in paralleling the matrix with the second phase in which the image is a misrepresentation that can be removed to reveal the reality beneath.64 Detmer departs from the others in suggesting that the films’ clarity of expression, plausibility, and coherence make them properly philosophical in ‘radical contrast to Baudrillard’s vision’.65 However, the article is marred by a serious misunderstanding of Baudrillard’s key concepts. The limitations of the definition of the hyperreal can be seen in Detmer’s retention of ‘nature’ as an unproblematic category throughout.66 Indeed, he winds up positing that one of the key ways to escape the hyperreal is to go camping.67 Detmer aside, the dominant tradition of viewing the trilogy as a bad copy of Baudrillard’s work was substantially reinforced by the philosopher’s interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in June 2003.68 Given the Wachowski brothers’ continual refusal to explain the precise meaning of the trilogy, Baudrillard’s willingness to expound his criticisms resulted in his becoming the authoritative voice on the films. In this way, the philosopher of simulation, who famously defined the postmodern as essentially nonsensical and meaningless, embraced the traditional role of God the Author. ­Baudrillard’s critique also forms part of the largely unfavourable critical reception of the second and third films. While Elie During argues that The Matrix Reloaded is the most ‘daring and speculative’ of the series, indeed it is also my favourite, this perspective is an exception to the rule.69 Most of the philosophical writing on the sequels views them as, at best, disappointing, and at worst, actively undermining the quality of the first film.70 This negative reception is at least partly the result of the sequels’ failure to deliver what the philosophical audience expected of them. Having defined the first film as ‘a heroic tale of the recovery of the real’,71 it was necessary for the sequels to continue this trajectory, charting the rescue of the unwittingly enslaved human pods. In the whole of Irwin’s first edited ­collection, it is only Žižek who predicts the trilogy’s explicit

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abandonment of an objective, unmediated reality;72 however, he too is not at all happy when this happens.73 Baudrillard’s critique of the trilogy both encapsulates and expands on a number of the objections raised in previous ­articles. The following analysis will address his three main criticisms, outlining their relation to prior readings of the trilogy and assessing their impact on future critical writing. Baudrillard’s first criticism follows the dominant tradition; he argues that The Matrix is not an accurate reflection of his work because it retains the concept of the real. The formulation of the objection differs slightly from its predecessors. For Baudrillard, the first two phases of the image are reliant on an opposition between reality and its image-copy. In the first, the image takes the form of a ‘good appearance’, while in the second it becomes an ‘evil appearance’.74 This formulation draws attention to the link between reality and truth that underpins the classical problem of illusion: the possibility that things might not be as they appear. In contrast, the ‘the era of simulacra and of simulations’ ushered in by the third and fourth phases has no reality and thus no ‘Last Judgement to separate the false from the true’.75 Baudrillard argues that The Matrix sets up an opposition between the city of Zion and the world of the matrix, which corresponds to the traditional dichotomy of reality/appearance. Thus the film is said to confuse ‘the new problem posed by simulation’ in which there is no reality or truth, with the classical problem of illusion.76 Baudrillard’s second criticism, that the trilogy is essentially hypocritical, follows two cues from the interviewer for Le Nouvel ­Observateur, Aude Lancelin. Lancelin suggests that The Matrix ‘purports to denounce technicist alienation and, at the same time, plays entirely on the fascination exercised by the digital universe and computer-generated images.’77 In his reply, Baudrillard comments that the film ‘paints the picture of a monopolistic superpower … and then collaborates in its refraction.’78 The criticism of the film as an entirely exemplary product of the capitalist processes that it claims to subvert is longstanding.79 Jonathan Romney wryly notes that ‘the most glaring paradox of the Matrix project … is that while it proposes a fictional programme for liberating ourselves from a dominating system – implicitly global capitalism and the entertainment complex – there isn’t a single commercially available piece of

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the puzzle that doesn’t somewhere bear the inscription “© Warner Bros”.’80 It is to be noted that the usual criticisms take the form of an image/reality dichotomy in which the fiction offered by the films is pitted against the reality of its marketing. This line of argument follows the traditional Marxist division between ideology and economic realities, thus conforming to the oppositional logic that is said to characterise phase two of the image. Baudrillard’s exposé of the trilogy’s collaboration with a monopolistic superpower follows a different line of argument. Rather than viewing the films as an example of the second phase of the image, he argues that they conform to the logic of the third. Just as Disneyland functions to persuade people of the existence of a reality that lies outside it, so the trilogy creates a vision of a state of liberation beyond the capitalist system. In both cases the image covers over the absence of the underlying oppositions: reality/­illusion, and systemic control/freedom. While most theorists argue that the trilogy is not outside the capitalist system but instead functions within it, Baudrillard’s point is that the films are complicit in the active destruction of fundamental oppositions such as outside/ inside. In the same way as Disneyland serves to Disneyfy the rest of America thereby spreading the hyperreal, the trilogy is said to spread global capitalism like a virus. ‘The message of The Matrix is its own diffusion by an uncontrollable and proliferating contamin­ ation.’81 Its role in the total eradication of opposition means that it ultimately ushers in a form of tautological logic encapsulated by Baudrillard’s famous putdown: ‘The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.’82 Baudrillard’s criticism of the trilogy as exemplary of the third phase of the image becomes the standard argument in later articles considering the relation between his work and the films. It displaces the dominant line of criticism in which the trilogy, particularly the first film, was castigated for misrepresenting the hyperreal. The parallel between the matrix and Disneyland is not invented by Baudrillard; Felluga sets out the comparison briefly in an earlier article.83 Importantly, it is Baudrillard’s authorial sanction of the argument that accounts for its widespread recurrence in later writing. The way in which the films are said to exemplify the third

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phase differs from my own analysis in that they are criticised for presenting a false reality and thus contributing to the virtualisation of the real. For During, the trilogy functions like Disneyland in that the ‘excess of images and deception is another attempt not to make us despair of reality, [but] to persuade us that it still exists.’84 William Merrin’s close reading of the interview material captures the hypocrisy of the trilogy’s role more precisely. ‘Baudrillard says that “the message” of … The Matrix “is its very propagation”, its relentless contamination of daily life, spreading simulation through a claimed critique of simulation. Whereas the matrix in the film, however, is a simulacrum that covers up the real, The Matrix itself is a simulacrum that helps to cover over its absence.’85 The impact of Baudrillard’s interview can be seen most clearly in articles that were rewritten after its publication. Jim Rovira’s and William Merrin’s detailed and complex analyses of the trilogy’s take up of the philosopher’s work were both affected by the publication of a piece that explicitly repudiated the connection. Rovira initially sets out a model loosely interconnecting the films with their philosophical source, arguing that ‘the western aesthetic has consistently taken direction in both form and theme from abstract theoretical frameworks.’86 Importantly, this means that changes to the Baudrillardian source are not simply designated as distortion. In the numerous versions of this article, Rovira consistently argues that the trilogy’s departures from the source text are a direct result of the limitations of the original.87 ‘Baudrillard’s critique of the West failed the Wachowski brothers when they wanted to move beyond critique.’88 However, the most recent version bears the marks of an unacknowledged return to the criterion of fidelity. Rovira incorporates material from the interview into his film readings, arguing that the first two films retain the concept of the real and therefore that ‘Baudrillard’s thesis is being abandoned.’89 The final version also sets up a series of new, highly evaluative metaphors that downgrade the films in relation to the philosophical original. Thus the Wachowski brothers are said to be ‘in … flight from their reading of Baudrillard’s nihilism’, a metaphor for cowardice that is then applied to the films: ‘the Trilogy flees true simulation’.90 In this way, a complex model that allows the tracing of different presentations of shared themes, such as nihilism and simulation, is undermined

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by the introduction of moments in which the Baudrillardian source is simply positioned as the one true version. While responding to the interview effects changes to Rovira’s work that set up a counterpoint to his overall argument, Merrin alters his assessment of the films’ philosophical role. His first article on The Matrix asserts that ‘the film moves beyond a merely illustrative function; its use of Baudrillard opening up an important arena in which to discuss contemporary developments in virtual reality, virtuality, and simulation, as well as in cinema and technology.’91 In contrast, the rewrite begins with the substantially modified claim that The Matrix functions as a ‘case study of aspects of Baudrillard’s media theory’ as well as providing a means ‘to explore’ his views of cinema and critique of the media.92 Although the first article does not really live up to its claims, focusing on the film as an illustration rather than an expansion of Baudrillard’s work,93 it does diverge from the standard use of the criterion of fidelity. Merrin notes the mistaken retention of the concept of the real world in The Matrix, but reads it as a failed attempt to contain the power of simulacra. This is paralleled with Baudrillard’s failed attempts to secure ‘a foundation for his own critique’ in the concept of ‘“symbolic exchange”’ defined as ‘a mode of relations, meaning and communication’. The symbolic, the ‘realm of lived reality and experience’ is constantly threatened by Baudrillard’s own conception of simulation, which has the power to overturn and nullify all forms of social relations and meaning. Thus Merrin concludes: ‘Baudrillard’s own war on simulacra … echoes that of The Matrix … both … fail to control or destroy its power.’94 Importantly, the suggestion that the Baudrillardian texts might be flawed is eradicated from the rewrite, thereby reconstructing the sources as great philosophy. As a result, the repeated reading of The Matrix as ‘domesticated Baudrillard’, a bowdlerized version that has removed the radical elements of the source, becomes more damning.95 The rewrite sets up a clear opposition between the authentic, innovative original and its flawed, filmic copy. Interestingly, Merrin’s suggestion that Baudrillard is not able to contain the implications of his concept of simulation provides a means of paralleling his work with that of Descartes. In narrative terms, both philosophers create a villain: simulation and scepticism

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respectively, that is more charismatic than their hero. Both develop corrosive lines of argument that become more famous than their proposed solutions. For Descartes, the question of radical doubt is ultimately solved by the postulation of a transcendental answer, a God who would not allow him to be deceived. For Baudrillard, there can be no such external anchoring points, however, monopolistic systems can be checked and possibly undermined by brief moments of reversal. In Simulacra and Simulation he offers the example of ‘a single ironic smile [that] effaces an entire discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master.’96 The quotation parallels two modes of reversal: the deconstructive capacity of irony and the disruption caused by the slave’s refusal. Baudrillard is interested in the master/slave dynamic as a form of subject/object relations, which he reworks by delineating the perspective of the object. Simulacra and Simulation contains scattered references to the subversive potential of the strategies of the object.97 However, this line of argument is more fully developed in later work.98 The recognition that Baudrillard’s work is made up of disparate lines of argument, which may or may not be compatible with his most famous concepts of the hyperreal and simulation, is vital for understanding the grounds for his final criticism of the trilogy. Baudrillard’s third criticism is that The Matrix Reloaded presents a vision of a closed, self-perpetuating system that does not reflect his overall theoretical position. However, his descriptions of the second film make its correspondence to the logic of the fourth phase of the image absolutely clear.99 ‘The pseudo-Freud who speaks at the film’s conclusion puts it well: at a certain moment, we reprogrammed the matrix in order to integrate anomalies into the equation. And you the resistors, comprise a part of it. Thus we are, it seems, within a total virtual circuit without an exterior.’100 This point differs from Baudrillard’s previous criticism in which the message of liberation from the matrix was said to function in accordance with the logic of the third phase, ostensibly offering a space of critique outside the system while actually contributing to the spread of global capitalism. The accusation of hypocrisy is no longer viable because the second film explicitly negates any conception of an outside. ‘There are no longer external Omega points or any antagonistic means

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available in order to analyze the world; there is nothing more than fascinated adhesion.’101 From these descriptions the second film would appear to be a perfect instantiation of the hyperreal. Needless to say, The Matrix Reloaded does not garner any plaudits from Baudrillard. It too meets with unrelenting criticism, however this film is castigated for failing to represent his overall position. The interview ends with a clear indication of the concepts that he deems crucial to the construction of his theoretical perspective: ‘reversibility, challenge and seduction are indestructible.’102 Thus Baudrillard’s chief complaint about The Matrix Reloaded is its lack of reversals: ‘the absence of a glimmer of irony that would allow viewers to turn this gigantic special effect on its head.’103 Importantly, this marks a key shift of the grounds of comparison through which to establish fidelity. It constitutes a move away from the use of specific aspects of Simulacra and Simulation to the adoption of the philosopher’s whole position. The latter is a more complicated concept in that Baudrillard’s position has been developed through at least twenty-seven sole-authored books and innumerable ­articles over the last forty years. Moreover, he effectively criticises the trilogy for failing to present his understanding of his position. The only consistent feature of Baudrillard’s analysis of the trilogy is the films’ role as an unfaithful adaptation. Indeed, the moment at which they appear to be faithful, the grounds governing the application of the fidelity criterion are changed. This highlights a crucial problem with the criterion itself. The adaptation theorist, Morris Beja, sums it up well. ‘What relationship should a film have to the original source? Should it be “faithful”? Can it be? To what?’104 The issue at stake here is not merely Baudrillard’s unacknow­ ledged transition from one textual source to many, but the untenable conception of textuality that underpins the fidelity model. Brian McFarlane argues that the concept of fidelity actually prevents a complex appreciation of the original source because it is reliant on a simplistic conception of meaning. ‘Fidelity criticism depends upon a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct “meaning”’.105 This single, true meaning is either rendered accurately or distorted by the filmic copy. ­McFarlane argues that the true meaning often takes the form of a posited textual essence, the spirit of the text, which is basically

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synonymous with each person’s own reading of it. Thus ‘the critic who quibbles at failures of fidelity is really saying no more than: “This reading of the original does not tally with mine in these and these ways”.’106 While McFarlane is right to be cynical about the very concept of true meaning, his individualistic analysis does not address the role of theoretical/critical secondary sources in creating ‘definitive’ readings of texts; or the academic hierarchies that serve to sanction some readings over others, thereby determining which will come to constitute the spirit. While philosophers rarely utilise the literary/poetic language of the spirit of the text, the conception of a single, underlying, true meaning is a key tenet in analytic approaches to reading philosophy. Thus reading philosophical texts is a process that generates right and wrong interpretations. The endeavour to construct a sense of the philosopher’s overall position or main argument generates a particular approach to textuality in which the complexities and ambiguities of language are systematically sacrificed. The construction of a philosopher’s overall position privileges a specific mode of reading: one that valorises congruence, coherence and continuity while eradicating potentially dissonant elements, resulting in the construction of a clear, coherent, universally accessible, meta-text. This meta-text is philosophy’s version of the spirit of the text and it too is created and defined through secondary criticism. Importantly, the parallels between the underlying conceptions of textuality explain the ease with which the criterion of fidelity could be co-opted into philosophical analyses of the films, thereby accounting for its continual re-emergence in philosophical writing on the trilogy. Challenging the criterion of fidelity involves attacking this conception of one true meaning by generating an awareness of the ways in which ‘original texts’ are actually subject to multiple interpretations. Once the ideal of a static, universal, original source is under threat, then philosophy and film stand equally as texts in that both are subject to a plurality of essentially provisional interpretations. Baudrillard’s final criticism of the trilogy involves a construction of his own position that also has to be seen as one reading among many. In contrast, Rovira argues that the films’ focus on the single text, Simulacra and Simulation, means that they

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do not attempt to present an overview of Baudrillard’s work. Thus ‘the Trilogy serves as the Wachowski Brothers’ snapshot of Baudrillard rather than an engagement with his thought over time.’107 The metaphor of a photograph taken from a specific perspective sets up an awareness of the trilogy’s status as a particular view of the philosophical text, drawing attention to the perspectival nature of interpretation. Moreover, in comparing the films to a snapshot rather than a particular reading, Rovira highlights the key role of the filmic image in conveying the philosophical content – a point that will be addressed in the next chapter. While the criterion of fidelity clearly plays a key role in the assessment of the trilogy’s take up of Baudrillard’s work, other elements of adaptation theory emerge in the few articles that posit a more complex inter-relation between philosophical and filmic texts. The previous models of the trilogy confined the films to a series of transitional roles: a bridge or springboard on the path to philosophy; tools or lenses for approaching/viewing fundamental questions. Importantly, all these metaphors serve to keep the boundaries between philosophy and film firmly intact. The films make no contribution to philosophical debate – at best they are allowed to illustrate elements of it. These models for approaching the films make it quite impossible to begin to think through the ways in which the trilogy might be philosophical or even be seen to do philosophy. In contrast, Wartenberg and Falzon set out complex models in which the films are allowed to play a part within philosophy. While the debate between the two theorists results in roles for the films that are ostensibly positive, they are still intrinsically limited. Wartenberg takes up Falzon’s definition of philosophy as ‘“a form of reflection in which we try to think about, clarify, and critically evaluate the most basic terms within which we think and act.”’108 However, unlike Falzon, Wartenberg is explicitly concerned with the problems that arise through the inter-relation of two different types of text: the (written) word that constitutes philosophy, and the image-dominated filmic multitrack. Thus, he comments: ‘we need to think about how an essentially but not exclusively visual medium can embody the form of critical reflection associated with certain written texts.’109 Wartenberg raises the issue of medium specificity through a discussion of the problems arising from

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p­ araphrase and translation. He considers the relation of an original metaphor and its paraphrase, focusing on the line ‘Juliet is the sun’ from Romeo and Juliet, which can be restated as ‘just as the sun is necessary for life, so is Juliet for Romeo.’110 Wartenberg notes that the paraphrase ‘results in specific interpretations of which likeness Romeo is thinking about, the very thing that the metaphor had left unstated’, concluding that the two do not have identical meanings.111 The same lack of identical meaning is notable in translations across cultures, suggesting that ‘meaning is tied to its medium of expression’.112 This implies that the transition from philosophy to film will always affect the meaning of the original work. Wartenberg postulates that each medium might have specific features that function to prevent translation from one to the other: ‘is there something distinctive about the screen version of a philosophic claim that makes it unique and different from the text version?’113 At this point, Wartenberg’s emphasis on medium specificity would appear to resemble that of the early adaptation ­theorists. George Bluestone regards novel to film adaptation as the ­paralleling of two autonomous media, each of which ‘is characterised by unique and specific properties.’114 The problem with such theories is that the emphasis on an absolute division between the two media, often achieved by focusing on their technological differences, ultimately ‘disallows almost any similarity between novel and film texts’ thus effectively short-circuiting any discussion of adaptation.115 Wartenberg avoids this pitfall by postulating a common ground between philosophical and filmic texts. Defining philosophy as process of logical argument that uses a wide variety of discursive techniques, he argues that film can embody a particular ‘element of ­philosophical argumentation’, specifically ‘the “thought experiment”’.116 As a result, Wartenberg’s position can be seen to constitute a form of comparability theory. Like its most famous exponent, Brian McFarlane, Wartenberg postulates a key element that links the two different types of texts. McFarlane focuses on novel to film adaptation and argues that it is narrative, specifically Barthesian narrative functions, that are directly transferable across the two media. The functions are contrasted with enunciative elements, such as figuration, whose ‘effects are closely tied to the semiotic system in which they are manifested’ and which therefore require

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‘adaptation proper’.117 While McFarlane’s position is considerably more sophisticated, both theorists set up models of transferable elements, argument and narrative respectively, that are able to bridge the gulf between two different media. For Wartenberg, a thought experiment is a step in an overall argument involving the postulation of a particular hypothesis ‘that is often at odds with [the reader’s] established patterns of belief.’118 Importantly, the success of the experiment is defined by its effects, which are to provoke the reader to consider ‘the question of what justifies her customary belief ’.119 He takes the evil genius hypothesis from Descartes’ first Meditation as a key example. While Descartes endeavours to follow the procedure of doubting everything in order to discover the few truths that are entirely beyond doubt, he finds himself falling back into habitual modes of thinking. In order to combat this tendency, Descartes postulates the existence of ‘an evil genius, as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading [him].’120 The thought experiment enables Descartes to entertain fully the possibility that everything he had previously taken to be true might be false. It therefore constitutes a key step in the overall argument that leads to the one thing that cannot be doubted: ‘I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.’121 Wartenberg argues that The Matrix screens Descartes’ thought experiment in an updated form with computers taking the role of the evil genius. The experiment is re-titled ‘the deception hypothesis’ demonstrated by the matrix, which constitutes a fictional world where all sensory experience is unreliable and ultimately shown to be false.122 The reading relies on a division between the pure artifice of the matrix and the world of the vats, which constitutes ‘the reality lying behind the matrix, the human body farm that produces the electricity that keeps the computers in power.’123 For Wartenberg, the crucial difference between Descartes’ and the film’s presentation of the thought experiment is that Descartes sets up the evil genius as a possibility, which he contemplates and later rejects, while the film ‘reveals that what all of the characters had taken to be real – and what we viewers had accepted as the film’s imaginary reality – was no more than an interactive computer programme.’124

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The last point is crucial for establishing the film’s philosophical role. Wartenberg argues that the audience shares the hero’s perspective: ‘As Neo comes to see that the world he had believed to be real was only a computer simulation, so do we.’125 This process of being initially taken in by the matrix and sharing Neo’s liberation from it means that the viewers ‘participate not only in the deception but also its subsequent removal.’126 The complex narrative sets out a process of transition, which encourages the audience critically to reflect on their own position. Thus the film places its viewers ‘in an epistemic position where they are faced with the question of what justifies their belief that they are not in an analogous situation to that of the Matrix’s inhabitants.’127 The audience of The Matrix is said to follow the same path as the interlocutors of Socrates, in that they are compelled to question their key concepts and beliefs. Wartenberg’s analysis is congruent with the Wachowski brothers’ stated hope that the films might generate ‘a little Socratic interaction’ discussed earlier in the chapter.128 Importantly, all agree that the philosophical value of the films lies in their capacity to provoke critical reflection. It is this capacity that underpins Wartenberg’s conclusion that The Matrix is ‘a film that genuinely philosophizes’.129 While this assessment of The Matrix constitutes a happy departure from predominantly negative evaluations of the trilogy, it is worth noting that the film’s philosophical contribution is defined solely through its effect on the audience. Strictly speaking, the film is not seen to have a philosophical position of its own – it merely causes others to philosophise. The chief problem with Wartenberg’s article is the unacknowledged transition from content to effect, which is the result of his presentation of the thought experiment as the sole transferable element between the different types of texts. He begins by paralleling Descartes’ evil genius with the matrix’s computers in that both are part of scenarios that call the validity of sensory experience into question: the deception hypothesis. The similarities between the dramatic scenarios are swept aside in favour of focusing on the function of the hypothesis itself, namely to cause the reader to question his/her beliefs. This transition from content to function fundamentally alters the relation between the films and their source text. Wartenberg begins by postulating a direct link to Descartes, the matrix reworks the evil

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genius hypothesis; and ends by posing an indirect one, the film’s evocation of ‘skeptical doubts in its viewers’ makes it comparable to other texts on scepticism such as Descartes’ Meditations.130 Furthermore, the contention that The Matrix causes its audience to philosophise really needs to be backed up by the appropriate empirical research. Other theorists have argued, equally plausibly, that the discovery of a reality outside the matrix constitutes a point of reassurance for the audience, which means that the transition to the real does not provoke critical reflection.131 Indeed for Merrin, this is the point at which both film and audience back away from philosophical thinking: ‘neither film nor audience could withstand the logical extrapolation of the film’s premise’ namely that the matrix as a simulacrum undermines all the alleged ‘realities’ that follow it.132 Importantly, all these hypothetical assessments of audience effect must be regarded as equally im/plausible until the empirical research proves otherwise. Falzon’s response to Wartenberg’s article begins by directly addressing the problem of the trilogy’s philosophical content. He takes issue with Žižek’s infamous assessment of the films as a Rorschach test, a kind of philosophical inkblot whose perceived form is entirely determined by the theoretical leanings of the viewer.133 Interestingly, this means that the philosophical aspect of the films is still defined in terms of its audience. However, Žižek’s analysis explicitly presents the trilogy as devoid of content, it is nothing more than it appears in the eye of the theoretically informed beholder. It is also clear from the new preliminary paragraph in Žižek’s second article that such beholders are profoundly mistaken.134 In contrast, Falzon argues that all theoretical readings of the trilogy are not equally sustainable: ‘some readings just don’t work at all, which suggests that in identifying philosophical positions and themes in particular films we are not only imposing significance upon them but also bringing out and amplifying something … [that] is going on within [them]’.135 For Falzon, The Matrix deliberately alludes to previous philosophical texts and themes, thereby ‘demanding to be read as philosophically significant’.136 He reads Morpheus’ dialogue prior to Neo’s transition to the world of the vats as a direct allusion to Descartes’ Meditations. ‘The conundrum … [Morpheus] poses … is pure Descartes: “Have you ever

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had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”’137 In addition to alluding directly to philosophical texts, Falzon sets out two more ways in which The Matrix can be viewed as philosophical. He argues that the film expands Cartesian scepticism, applying it to new technologies such as the cinema, cyberspace, virtual reality and computer games.138 He also takes up Wartenberg’s argument, suggesting that the film embodies ‘a process of philosophising.’139 Importantly for Falzon, the different levels of engagement with philosophical themes in terms of both content and effect ‘opens up the film to a further level of interaction with philosophy, … it becomes possible for … the film to be subjected to philosophical criticism.’140 Thus Falzon argues that Neo’s escape from the matrix to the real world of the vats is a clumsy attempt to resolve the problem of sceptical doubt. ‘But the issue of scepticism cannot be so easily contained … and it returns to trouble the rest of the film. There is nothing to prevent the reality Neo and the rebels inhabit being just another Matrix’.141 This criticism highlights a crucial shift: from the criteria that are used to establish the film’s status as philosophical, such as allusions to Descartes; to the grounds for evaluating the film as philosophy, specifically its presentation of an overall argument. For Falzon, ‘The Matrix fails to fully deal with or follow through on the very scepticism theme that it raises.’ The film’s logical inconsistencies are said to undermine both its presentation of Descartes and its attempts to expand Cartesian scepticism into new areas. Falzon’s shift from acknowledging quotation to evaluating argument covers over another key transition, from Descartes’ ­Meditations to an interpretative tradition that begins with Hume.142 Within this tradition, Descartes is read as a sceptic and Cartesian scepticism redefined as a force in itself. While Falzon’s assessment of the film’s argument uses the language of logical inconsistency, it is to be noted that the film fails to follow a particular line of argument. Within this tradition, Descartes himself fails to solve the problems arising from sceptical doubt, which would suggest that the film is in rather good company. There is no logical reason why a text that alludes to Descartes should be castigated for not

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replicating a line of argument that belongs to a particular tradition of critical interpretation. Thus Falzon’s suggestion that the films should be subjected to philosophical criticism amounts to their assimilation within a tradition of philosophical critique. In this way, the films are simply seen to replicate the problems arising in their more illustrious philosophical sources. Falzon’s argument can therefore be seen to expand the criterion of fidelity, in that it assumes that references to a specific philosophical text can be judged as though they constituted an exposition of that text and its associated criticism. The issue at stake here is the relation of film and logical argument. For Falzon, to count as philosophy films must be judged in terms of their presentation of lines of argument. This is clearly problematic in that few films offer the kind of direct exposition from premises to conclusion that analytic philosophy defines as essential to proper argument. While Wartenberg also expresses reservations about the way in which Falzon subjects film texts to philosophical critique,143 his solution clearly privileges argument in choosing a specific aspect, the thought hypothesis, as the one transferable element between philosophical and filmic texts. Wartenberg’s own comments on the differential framing of the deception hypothesis in Descartes’ Meditations and The Matrix highlight a crucial issue. In the philosophical text the function of the argument, its effect on the reader, can be extrapolated from its presentation as a step in a process. Transformed into narrative, the hypothesis is no longer clearly demarcated as a step and therefore its associated ‘function’ is much more difficult to define. In contrast, Falzon’s comparison of the two texts makes it clear that the philosophical work and the film offer similar dramatic scenarios as well as using the same metaphors to set up the possibility of deception, specifically the opposition between dreams and reality. Crucially, this suggests that the link between philosophical and filmic texts is not argument but figuration, the presentation of dramas, metaphors and images. The key role of figuration in the interlinking of the two media will be fully explored and developed in chapter two. The suggestion that figuration could constitute a key means of interlinking different types of texts should not be read as a new form of comparability theory. The problem with both Wartenberg’s

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and McFarlane’s models of transferable elements is that they act as the sole points of continuity between two very different media. Thus the focus on the single point of continuity broadens the gulf between the different types of texts, setting up oppositions that pit the conceptual value of the (written) word against the perceptual nature of film.144 The next chapter will use the latest developments in adaptation theory in order to challenge such oppositional conceptions of the relation between the written word and the filmic multitrack. Importantly, the focus on figuration will end by tracing the ways in which the symbolic is linked to the conceptual, ensuring that film can be seen to philosophise in the sense of producing particular theoretical positions and arguments. The elucidation of argument will involve close analysis of the figurative elements within the film texts, a reading technique that will also be applied to the Baudrillardian source material. While later chapters will set out an interpretation of Baudrillard’s ­Simulacra and Simulation, the concomitant film readings will not be governed by the criterion of fidelity. Instead, the analyses will illuminate the elements of textual detail that are taken up and the ways in which their recontextualisation enables them to take on new roles, thereby constructing alternative lines of argument and ultimately a different theoretical position. In this way, the delineation of argument will be clearly signalled as a precarious process of interpretation that relies on the symbolic significance of the textual details. For Rovira, The Matrix Trilogy is the ‘unintended future of Baudrillard’s thesis’.145 While he is quite right to stress the ways in which the films break away from their source offering their own project, the next chapter will set out a non-linear model of the inter-relations between the two texts in which the adaptation has the capacity to alter our conception of the original.

Notes 1 J. Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Jean Baudrillard’, trans. G. Genosko and A. Bryx, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/genosko.htm (accessed on 12/3/07). 2 T. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened: experiencing The Matrix’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 27 (2003) 139–52. C. Falzon, ‘Philosophy and The Matrix’, in M.

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3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10



11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

Diocaretz and S. Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 97–112. S. Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 38. W. Irwin, ‘Coming Attractions: “where have you gone Mr. Anderson?”’, in W. Irwin (ed.), More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2005), p. xii. L. Marinoff, ‘The Matrix and Plato’s cave: why the sequels failed’, in Irwin (ed.) More Matrix and Philosophy, p. 5. My italics. C. Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore The Matrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 38. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 73. This constitutes another variant of the prejudices concerning the non-intellectual nature of film explored by Robert Stam. R. Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, in R. Stam and A. Raengo (eds) Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) p.  7. C. Grau ‘Introduction’, in Grau (ed.) Philosophers Explore The Matrix, pp. 3–9, p.  4. Ibid., p. 3. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened: experiencing The Matrix’, p. 144. See, for example, Gerald Erion’s and Barry Smith’s general discussion of skepticism in ‘Skepticism, morality and The Matrix’, in W. Irwin (ed.), The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 16–27. Bassham comments that the Greek etymology of Neo’s name provides a direct association with the ‘new’. G. Bassham, ‘The religion of The Matrix and the problems of pluralism’, in Irwin (ed.), The Matrix and Philosophy, p. 111. Ibid., pp. 115, 118. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., 121. Ibid., pp. 118–19. Ibid., p.125. Ibid. The Wachowski Brothers, ‘Introduction’ to The Ultimate Matrix Collection, DVD boxed set, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc, 2004, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. M. Lawrence, Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind The Matrix ­Trilogy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 3. W. Irwin, ‘Introduction: meditations on The Matrix’, in Irwin (ed.), The Matrix and Philosophy, p. 2. Erion and Smith, ‘Skepticism, morality and The Matrix’, p. 18. My italics. Lawrence, Like a Splinter in Your Mind, p. 3. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 3.

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Good example, bad philosophy  37 30 Wartenberg’s criticisms differ from mine. He complains about the lack of j­usti­­ fication for the choice of the particular philosophical texts that are discussed in relation to the films. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p. 140. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. My italics. 33 M. Litch, Philosophy Through Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 7. 34 Ibid., pp. 16–18. 35 Ibid., p. 17. 36 R. Simpkins, ‘Visualizing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation through The Matrix’, Notes on Contemporary Literature, 30:4 (2000), pp. 6–7. 37 See, for example, R. Hanley, ‘Simulacra and Simulation: Baudrillard and The Matrix’, essay added to the official website on 19/12/03. http://whatisthematrix. warnerbros.com (accessed 3/3/04). 38 D. Felluga, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur? part I’, in G. Yeffeth (ed.), Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2003), p. 86. 39 A. Gordon, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur? part II’, in Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill, p. 119. 40 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 6. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 12. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 6. 47 Gordon, ‘The Matrix’, p. 109. 48 Ibid., pp. 111–12. 49 R. Kilbourn, ‘Re-Writing Reality: reading The Matrix’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 9:2 (2000), p. 48. 50 D. Lavery, ‘From cinespace to cyberspace: Zionists and agents, realists and gamers in The Matrix and eXistenZ’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 28:4 (2001) p. 156. An edited version of this quote can be found in Gordon, ‘The Matrix’, p. 120. 51 This is contrary to Lutzka’s own assessment of his article as a break away from the allegedly dominant tradition of viewing The Matrix as a successful, faithful adaptation of Baudrillard’s work. S. Lutzka, ‘Simulacra, simulation and The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, p. 119. 52 Ibid., p. 123. Lavery’s concluding comment on The Matrix reads: ‘The real world exists, even under the reign of Baudrillard’s “Third Order of Simulacra”, and cinematic art … can represent it and tell a heroic tale of its recovery.’ ‘From cinespace to cyberspace’, p. 156. 53 Gordon, ‘The Matrix’, p. 106. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p.112. 56 Lutzka, ‘Simulacra, Simulation and The Matrix’, p. 121.

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38  Adapting philosophy 57 Gordon, ‘The Matrix’ p. 116. 58 D. Knight and G. McKnight, ‘Real genre and virtual philosophy’, in Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy, p. 201. 59 I. Callus, ‘“New theory”? The Posthumanist Academy and the beguilements of The Matrix Trilogy’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, p. 296. 60 Gordon, ‘The Matrix’, p. 106. 61 Ibid., p. 119. 62 D. Detmer, ‘Challenging Simulacra and Simulation: Baudrillard in The Matrix’, in Irwin (ed.) More Matrix and Philosophy, pp. 97–9, 103–4. 63 Ibid., p. 103. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., pp. 100, 106. 67 Ibid., p. 108. 68 Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded’. 69 E. During, ‘Is there an exit from ‘virtual reality’? Grid and network – from Tron to The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, p. 135. 70 See, for example: Irwin, ‘Coming Attractions’, p. xi; Marinoff, ‘The Matrix and Plato’s Cave:’, pp. 7–10; Herbrechter, ‘Introduction: theory in the Matrix’, p. 13. 71 Lutzka, ‘Simulacra, simulation and The Matrix’, p. 119. 72 S. Žižek, ‘The Matrix: or the two sides of perversion’, in Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy, p. 245. 73 The change in Žižek’s view of the film/s is evident from the very negative first paragraph. See ‘Reloaded Revolutions’, in Irwin (ed.) More Matrix and Philosophy, p. 198. 74 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 6. 75 Ibid. 76 Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded:’ 77 A. Lancelin, in Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded’. This criticism is the same as Cynthia Freeland’s analysis of The Matrix, ‘Penetrating Keanu: new holes but the same old shit’, in Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy, pp. 206, 214–15. 78 Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded’. 79 See for example: M. A. Danahay and D. Reider, ‘The Matrix, Marx, and the coppertop’s life’, in Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy, pp. 223–4; and J. Clarke, ‘Space invaders: speculations on the politics of post-modern space in recent science fiction films’, Cineaction, 51, February 2000, p. 16. 80 J. Romney, ‘Everywhere and nowhere’, Sight and Sound, 13:7 (2003), p. 27. 81 Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded’. 82 Ibid. 83 Felluga, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur? Part I’, p. 91. 84 During, ‘Is there an exit from ‘virtual reality’?’, p. 136. In his introduction to the same volume, Herbrechter argues that The Matrix does away with the reality/illusion dichotomy, resulting in the eradication of the real. Herbrechter, ‘Introduction: theory in The Matrix’ p. 12.

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Good example, bad philosophy  39 85 W. Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) pp. 130–1. The italicisation of words other than film titles is mine. 86 J. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy’, http://artisanitorium.thehydden.com/nonfiction/film/matrix.htm, downloaded 12/12/2003. 87 For an account of the many versions of this article, see J. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy, and the future of religion’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, fn. 1, http://ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/rovira.htm (accessed 12/3/07). 88 Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard and The Matrix ­Trilogy’. 89 Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy, and the future of religion’. 90 Ibid. My italics. 91 W. Merrin, ‘“Did you ever eat tasty wheat?”: Baudrillard and The Matrix’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, www.Nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/posted 8/2/03. 92 Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, p. 115, my italics. 93 This is obvious given that the only scene in the film to garner unqualified praise is Neo’s car journey on the way to the Oracle, which is extolled for accurately reflecting Baudrillard’s concept of simulation. Merrin, ‘Did you ever eat tasty wheat?’. 94 Merrin, ‘Did you ever eat tasty wheat?’. 95 Merrin, ‘Did you ever eat tasty wheat?’ and Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, pp. 121, 127–8. 96 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 163. 97 Ibid., pp. 85–6,149–50, 163. 98 See Herbrechter’s assessment of Baudrillard as a writer of ‘“psychotic” theoryfiction of a “subjectless” object’. S. Herbrechter, ‘The posthuman subject in The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory, pp. 256–8. Quotation from p. 256. 99 Rovira also notes a number of ‘confluences’ between Baudrillard’s criticisms of the films and his writing. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy, and the future of religion’. 100 Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded’. My italics. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 M. Beja, Film and Literature (Longman: New York, 1979) p. 80, quoted in B. McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 9. 105 McFarlane, Novel to Film, p. 8. 106 Ibid., p. 9. 107 Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy, and the future of religion’. 108 C. Falzon, Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2002) p. 9, quoted in Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p. 142. 109 Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p. 143.

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40  Adapting philosophy 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

Ibid. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid. Ibid. G. Bluestone, Novels into Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) p. 6 quoted in Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 45. Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 47. For a full analysis of medium specific theories and their problems see pp. 43–51. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p. 145. McFarlane, Novel to Film, quotations from pp. 20 and 13 respectively. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p. 145. Ibid. R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. D. A. Cross (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 1980), p. 22 quoted in Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p.  146. R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 17. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p. 146. Ibid., p.149. Ibid. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid. Wartenberg’s analysis was actually published a year before the Wachowski ­brothers’ ‘Introduction’ to The Ultimate Matrix Collection. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, p. 152. Ibid. Litch, Philosophy Through Film, p. 16. Falzon, ‘Philosophy and The Matrix’, pp. 101–3. Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, p. 121. Žižek, ‘The Matrix: or the two sides of perversion’ pp. 240–1. Žižek, ‘Reloaded revolutions’, p. 198. Falzon, ‘Philosophy and The Matrix’, pp. 98–9. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., pp. 99–100. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 101, my italics. Ibid., p. 102. I have to thank Kurt Brandhorst for helping me to formulate this line of argument. Wartenberg, ‘Philosophy screened’, pp. 141–3. McFarlane, Novel to Film, pp. 26–7. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy, and the future of religion’.

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2

Adapting philosophy/ philosophy as adaptation

T

he first chapter explored the ways in which philosophical writing on The Matrix Trilogy used categories drawn from adaptation theory, particularly the criterion of fidelity to the original text. This chapter will begin with a brief survey of the philosophical models that inform adaptation theory, focusing on variants of the word/image dichotomy in which the ‘perceptual’ nature of the filmic image renders it necessarily incapable of the complex symbolisation and conceptual abstraction of language. This will be followed by an assessment of Kamilla Elliott’s analysis of the ways in which structuralist models of meaning serve to perpetuate the subordination of the image to the (written) word.1 In contrast to Elliott, I will argue that aspects of structuralist linguistics are entirely congruent with her solution to the problem, which is to set out new models of the multifarious symbolic dimensions of film.2 Another way out of the word/image dichotomy is offered by Michèle Le Doeuff, who analyses the role played by imagery in philosophical texts.3 This chapter will draw on my previous work on Le Doeuff, which builds on her analysis of the theoretical capacity of philosophical imagery to create a model for tracing the conceptual aspects of filmic imagery.4 The chapter will offer a new methodology for thinking about adaptation in which the symbolic and conceptual aspects of figuration will constitute the key means of linking philosophical and filmic texts. The assertion that images are necessarily incapable of conveying complex symbolism or abstract thought usually utilises one of two key arguments: in the first the image is a pure surface and thus too insubstantial to convey the gravitas of the word; in the second the

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image is corporeal and thus too substantial to convey the abstract concepts generated by ‘serious, transcendent art form[s]’.5 Adaptation theorists have already begun to examine the philosophical/ theological definitions and binary oppositions that underpin these analyses of the image. Robert Stam makes clear their investment in deconstructing the ‘unstated doxa’ that serve to sustain the ‘subaltern status of adaptation’.6 Importantly, the continual reemergence of key definitions of the image as insubstantial surface/corporeal substance within both adaptation theory and criticism indicates that the usual separation of the theoretical and the critical, practised by Sarah Cardwell and Kamilla Elliott among others, is highly problematic.7 The persistence of philosophical definitions and binary oppositions is proof of the impossibility of maintaining a separate category of pure theoretical writing as well as the pervasive nature of philosophy itself. As Le Doeuff memorably puts it, ‘whether we like it or not, we are within philosophy, surrounded by … divisions that philosophy has helped to articulate and refine’.8 Both Stam and Cardwell trace the definition of the image as pure surface back to Plato.9 The analysis of the visual arts occurs in book X of The Republic. Plato sets up a tripartite distinction between the perfect world of the Forms, which is defined as true and real, the physical world of phenomena, which is a copy of the Forms, and representational art. Art is defined as mimetic, a literal imitation of physical phenomena, and thus a copy of a copy ‘at a third remove from the throne of truth’ of the Forms.10 While art is defined as illusory, it is described in images that stress its lack of reality or substance. Plato’s narrator compares the creation of representational art to spinning a mirror: ‘take a mirror and turn it round in all directions; before long you will create sun and stars and earth, yourself and all other animals and plants …’.11 The inter­ locutor immediately characterises the reflections as ‘not real’, thereby earning a rare moment of unqualified approval from the narrator!12 On Plato’s model a physical object is a copy of the single true Form and described as ‘a shadowy thing compared to reality’.13 Representational art has no relation to the Form whatsoever – it is an imitation of the object’s ‘superficial appearance’.14 Devoid of any relation to reality, art is compared to ‘an apparition’, literally a ghost, and thus presented as even less substantial than a mere shadow.15

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Earlier in The Republic, Plato sets out a tripartite schema of Forms, phenomena and shadows, in the famous simile of the cave. The first part of the myth charts the process of becoming a philosopher, envisaged as an escape from the cave and a slow, unsteady passage from darkness to light. The prisoners in the cave are ‘so fastened that they can only look straight ahead’ at the shadow play on the opposite wall, which they consequently believe to be ‘the whole truth’.16 One is let loose and discovers on turning around that the shadows are caused by people walking up and down a pathway behind the prisoners and in front of a fire. He ascends the pathway, thereby making the transition from delusion to true belief, finally escaping from the cave into the dazzling sunlight, which marks the dawn of reason. The sun is ‘the form of the good … responsible for whatever is right and valuable in anything … the source of light, and … controlling source of truth and intelligence’.17 In this myth, the shadows’ ontological status as copies of copies is equated with a state of delusion. As a result the parallel that is frequently drawn between the shadow play and the cinematic image must be regarded as a particularly problematic way to characterise the cinema.18 The shadows simply serve to distract people from the philosophical search for truth and reality, thus setting up an absolute division between philosophy and the (filmic) image. Plato’s hugely influential conception of the image as an insubstantial, false illusion is built on a series of key metaphors: the image as copy, reflection, ghost and shadow, which are currently circulated in writing on postmodernism and adaptation. Indeed Baudrillard’s playful expansion of Plato’s imagery will be discussed at the end of the chapter. Cardwell argues that adaptation criticism takes up aspects of Plato’s myth of the cave, giving the example of D. J. Enright’s dismissive assessment of the BBC’s dramatisation of Vanity Fair as ‘a very elegant shadow, a well-dressed skeleton’.19 I would suggest that the emphasis on the shadow/skeleton’s lack of substance recalls the spectral shadow of book X of The Republic. Interestingly, lack of substance is conveyed through the references to beauty and fashion and Cardwell traces the ways in which the aesthetic beauty of television serials results in their condemnation as charming and superficial.20 It can therefore be seen that Plato’s characterisation of the image as an insubstantial shadow intersects

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with later philosophical definitions of the beautiful. In turn, the gendering of the division between the sublime and the beautiful feminises the shadow play, providing different metaphors for its falsity. Edmund Burke analyses the beauty presented by gradual variation in colour, giving the example of a woman’s breast, which is described as a ‘deceitful maze’ because the (male) viewer’s gaze becomes lost within it.21 Plato’s false illusion thus becomes feminine duplicity.22 Stam and Elliott provide slightly different analyses of the ­corporeal nature of the filmic image. Stam addresses the ways in which reading literature is constructed as a purely cerebral activity, creating figures in the ‘mind’s eye’, as opposed to the physicality of the kinetic and kinaesthetic means through which film is said directly to engage the viewer.23 He argues that such analyses set up a mind/body dichotomy, which reinforces the opposition between word and image.24 Elliott examines how the alleged division between the novel’s appeal to the mind and film’s appeal to the eye sustains the distinction between the conceptual nature of the mental image and the perceptual nature of the visual image. Virginia Woolf ’s famous comments on reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina equate the conceptual means through which the text is read with its cerebral content: ‘the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind.’25 By contrast in the film ‘the emphasis is laid … upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet’, the sensory mode of access to the text mirrors the inane materialism of its content.26 Elliott concludes ‘[t]he novel holds the higher organ, the brain, while the film garners only the sensory, bestial, and materialistic eye.’27 Elliott argues that the mind/eye dichotomy has its roots in the Christian valorisation of the spirit over the flesh.28 Within the ­Christian tradition, flesh is regarded as the impure, decaying, material trappings that briefly house the immortal soul. This can be seen to draw on aspects of ancient Greek philosophy and mythology, such as Plato’s analysis of the death of Socrates. Here death is presented as positive in that it constitutes a means of leaving the material body, which is subject to desire and emotion, thereby becoming pure spirit/reason. Elliott is particularly interested in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, in which Christ is celebrated as the Word made flesh, a paradox that underlines his unique

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s­ piritual status. She argues that the critical conception of adaptation as the literary word made filmic flesh is so common that it requires a category of its own, which she entitles ‘the incarnational concept of adaptation’.29 This category is said to have developed out of the Victorian practice of ‘realization’, the process of ‘adapting more abstract arts into less abstract arts’, for example, poems into plays and paintings into tableaux.30 While Elliott attempts to view the category of adaptation as incarnation positively, offering an initial definition of it as the creation of ‘a more total representation’ that constitutes the fulfilment of the Word,31 her discussion charts the dominance of the theological/philosophical paradigms that downgrade materiality: ‘most critics prefer to castigate realization as carnalization, a sordid, morally reprehensible corruption of spiritual and transcendental signification’.32 The intersection of different philosophical/theological definitions within writing on adaptation generates opposing conceptions of the image as pure surface and corporeal substance. The image is thus a paradox, simultaneously too insubstantial and too substantial; however, its position either side of the binary is utilised to the same effect – it is barred from being abstract/conceptual/ symbolic. The paradoxical conception of the image greatly resembles the construction of woman within Western philosophy. She is both utterly superficial – the pure surface of feminine beauty – and unbearably material – the matrix/matter necessary for reproduction. Both definitions place woman beyond the domain of reason and therefore outside philosophy itself. Importantly, the excessive nature of feminine superficiality/materiality serves to construct and uphold the masculine as both norm and ideal. In the same way, the paradoxical status of the image should alert us to the crucial role it plays in idealising the (written) word as the sole repository of complex symbolisation and conceptual abstraction. Elliott argues that the materiality of the filmic image has the capacity to expose language’s ‘promised illimitability and universality … as illusive and empty.’33 Stam comments that film has the power to make words appear ‘weak, spectral and insubstantial’, inverting the ­standard application of the Platonic imagery.34 In both cases the power of the filmic image is reasserted through a reconceptualisation of its materiality, however there are other ways out of the paradox; this

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chapter will explore what happens if the beautiful illusion becomes a means of abstract thought and thus integral to philosophy. While writing on adaptation can be seen to utilise philo­sophical/ theological definitions and divisions, it also takes up definitions and oppositions developed for the classification of other art forms. Elliott focuses on the attempt by eighteenth-century aestheticians to emulate scientific systems of classification, resulting in the ­division of art forms into differential categories.35 She argues that it is Gotthold Lessing’s classification of poetry and painting, as respectively temporal and spatial, which creates another key binary underpinning twentieth-century debates on adaptation.36 ­Bluestone’s definitions of the novel and film as differential art forms thus combine familiar philosophical binaries with ­Lessing’s ­categories: ‘designating the novel as conceptual, linguistic, dis­cursive, symbolic and inspiring mental imagery, with time as its formative principle, and the film as perceptual, visual, presentational, literal, and given to visual images, with space as its formative principle.’37 Elliott argues that this set of oppositions continues to inform recent adaptation theory.38 It is perhaps most surprising to see them re-emerging unchallenged in Brian McFarlane’s work, which is often praised for providing the first truly rigorous, theoretical methodology for analysing adaptation.39 McFarlane draws on structuralist models of narrative to provide a framework for charting the changes that occur in the transposition from novel to film, distinguishing between transferable elements (narrative) and those that require ‘adaptation proper’.40 The list of the latter elements utilises Lessing’s categories in that the novel’s temporal ‘linearity’ is contrasted with film’s ‘spatiality’.41 While McFarlane recognises that film is a visual/verbal/aural multitrack, his analysis of the different signifying systems used by literature and film falls back into familiar binaries: ‘the verbal sign, with its low iconicity and high symbolic function, works conceptually, whereas the cinematic sign, with its high iconicity and uncertain symbolic function works directly, sensuously, perceptually.’42 The reassertion of the conceptual/perceptual binary simply repositions film within the lesser half of the word/image dichotomy. Elliott contends that the re-emergence of the word/image dichotomy within McFarlane’s work is the logical consequence

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of his take up of structuralist concepts and categories. She holds structuralism responsible for sedimenting the division between the word and the image through its provision of terminology that confines the two to entirely separate spheres, such as Barthes’ division between the graphic and the iconic.43 In this way, the order of ‘semantics, signs and referents’ is said to assert ‘the irreducibility and untranslatability of words and images’.44 Moreover, the differences between the two are said to be compounded by Saussure’s conception of an insoluble bond between the signifier (the form of a word) and the signified (its meaning or content). The ­indivisibility of form and content, coupled with the untranslatable nature of words and images, is said to make novel to film adaptation a ­theoretical impossibility.45 Elliott’s initial presentation of this ­argument takes the strong form of a reductio ad absurdum in that structuralist ­theoretical categories are debunked by showing the absurd nature of their consequences.46 Theorists who ignore the ‘cultural ubiquity’ of adaptation, treating it as a theoretical impossibility, are chastised for being ‘ostriches with heads buried in the sands of philosophical and semiotic abstraction.’47 While demonstrating that structuralist tenets render adaptation logically impossible, Elliott also argues that the general acceptance of two key premises, the irreducibility of words and images and the bond between form and content, has spawned the ­dominant model within adaptation theory. The ‘structural analogical model of adaptation’ is said to presuppose that direct translation between the mediums of literature and film is impossible, consequently ‘critics argue that adapters can at best only locate stylistic and structural analogies across the two systems.’48 It is to be noted that Elliott’s previous designation of critical categories presented adaptation as a product, while her delineation of theoretical models defines adaptation as a process, focusing on the role of the adapter.49 ‘Adapters working under a verbal-to-visual model of adaptation typically seek visual symbols to approximate words’.50 It is at this point that the structural analogical model is said to segue neatly with the word/image dichotomy in that film can only provide crude, literal, visual symbols that do not convey the complexity of the word. Elliott quotes Woolf ’s analysis of filmic imagery as the visual equivalent of ‘words of one syllable … A kiss

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is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.’51 Importantly, the numerous inadequacies of the structuralist model of adaptation are traced back to its basis in structuralist theorising. In this way, Elliott is able to hold structuralism responsible for defining the visual image as necessarily incapable of conveying complex symbolism. She concedes that structuralist theories have broadened definitions of textuality to include non-verbal representations, such as film and photography, which has resulted in the general acceptance of their usefulness for the elucidation of the symbolic dimensions of such texts.52 However, Elliott argues that the analysis of the visual media as texts has simply involved their subjugation to categories derived from literature and linguistics, thus reasserting the primacy of the (written) word.53 Barthes’ analysis of photography in Mythologies is said to exemplify the process: ‘his rhetoric continues the long-standing favoring of words over pictures and subjugates pictorial signs to linguistic paradigms.’54 As a result, Barthes is said to make meaning itself ‘synonymous with verbal language.’55 Part of the problem here is that the academic explanation of the photograph’s visual symbolism must take the verbal form of critical analysis. However, Elliott offers the stronger argument that pictures are turned into words in order to be considered meaningful, which forms a preface to her key objection: ‘nowhere in this essay does Barthes suggest that writing be conversely and reciprocally subjected to pictorial terms and parameters.’56 Barthes’ failure to consider the pictorial dimension of words is due to his absolute separation of the graphic and the iconic. Elliott challenges this distinction along with the conceptual/perceptual binary by borrowing from cognitive theory, biological analyses of how we are said to perceive words and images. She quotes cognitive scientist Nicholas Wade’s work in which he states that ‘[w]ritten words form graphical images that are rarely acknowledged as such because their significance is defined almost entirely at the mental image level.’57 Thus the perceptual process of reading graphemes (letters) on a page is eradicated by focusing on the symbolic aspect of what the words represent. Elliott draws together a number of different cognitive models to argue that graphemes and images are both objects of perception – the word must be seen or touched,

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the visual image must be seen. Moreover, within cognitive theory, perception is indivisible from comprehension, written words and visual images are said to engage the same parts of the brain but in reverse order.58 Elliott takes up this conception of the inverse processes of cognition of words and images in her analysis of the ways in which we recognise and comprehend literary and filmic figuration. ‘Figures like literary metaphors and similes frequently require the creation of mental pictorial images in order to process them … In film, visual symbols … depend on processes of mental verbalizing or narration for their comprehension.’59 It is at this point that she provides the solution to Barthes’ failure to subject writing to pictorial terms, for figurative writing is pictorial in two ways: firstly at the level of the imagery itself and secondly through its evocation of mental images. Importantly, Elliott’s conclusion has a particular logical form: ‘if a verbal metaphor raises mental imaging, then conversely and inversely, a pictorial metaphor raises mental verbalizing.’60 It is this model of the inversely, inherent nature of opposites, exemplified by an object and its reflection in a looking glass, that Elliott uses to break away from the oppositional logic that sustains the binaries of conceptual/perceptual and word/image.61 In presenting cognitivism as a form of looking-glass logic, Elliott is able to offer two rather different solutions to the problems of structuralism simultaneously. It is to be noted that one solution takes the form of the valorisation of particular rhetorical structures, specific analogies and metaphors that will be discussed later, while the other is a meta-critical account of the way language and images are processed. Elliott’s tentative promotion of cognitivism as a true scientific solution in the final chapter sits uneasily alongside her successful deconstruction of the scientific pretensions of structuralist linguistics.62 This lack of fit between the terms of critique and the proffered solutions is characteristic of Elliott’s treatment of structuralism, while the theories are ostensibly debunked for generating absurdities; the terminology is utilised throughout the book, playing a crucial role in the defining of critical and theoretical categories as well as the analyses of specific film texts. The unacknowledged reliance on linguistics can be seen to underpin one of the solutions provided in the final chapter in which the ­rhetorical

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category of analogy becomes the means of reconceptualising ­adaptation. The tensions arising from the contrasting presentation and ­utilisation of structuralism throughout Elliott’s book are exemplified by the inconsistent assessment of Christian Metz’s work, The Imaginary Signifier, in the final chapter.63 Elliott’s first reference to Metz in chapter 6 positions him within a line up of critics who are said to share the ‘conviction that film is incapable of effective figurative expression’.64 This surprising misreading of Metz’s position is only understandable given Elliott’s general view of structuralism as the means by which filmic images are defined as necessarily incapable of conveying complex symbolism. The second quotation from The Imaginary Signifier occurs two pages later. Here Metz incurs Elliott’s approval for ostensibly recognising that filmic figuration cannot be effectively analysed according to models drawn from literary templates. However, this is immediately undercut by the argument that Metz’s take up of Lacanian psychoanalysis leads him to ‘subjugate filmic figures to linguistic structures’.65 The first two references position Metz as a super-structuralist who is responsible for the downgrading of film via the imposition of linguistic models that, at some level, he recognises to be inappropriate. The third and final reference to The Imaginary Signifier is somewhat surprising in that Metz becomes the precursor to Elliott’s own project. This link is based on a key quotation: ‘the rhetorical tradition should have prepared us to think of figurations as kinds of turning movements, with a fifty-fifty chance, so to speak, of surmounting the barrier of the word; should have taught us to dissociate the figural from the lexical.’66 The separation of the figural from the lexical is crucial to Elliott’s solution in which figuration becomes the key means of linking the verbal and the visual. Metz offers at least two complex analyses of the construction of ‘filmic textuality’ in The Imaginary Signifier.67 The chapter cannot be read as the simple subjugation of film to a pre-defined set of linguistic categories given that Metz draws key concepts from a number of different models, including classical rhetoric, structural linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis, redefining all of them in the process. The chapter falls into two parts, the first is an exploration of the ‘detailed surface-structural taxonomies’ of filmic

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figures,68 conjoining classical rhetorical definitions of metaphor and metonymy with Jakobson’s analysis of paradigm and syntagm.69 The second part focuses on the underlying processes that create meaning, utilising aspects of Freud’s work on condensation and displacement, which are redefined as the mechanisms of ‘meaning itself ’.70 The transition from the discussion of figures as textual ornaments to the analysis of meaning as textual operations is validated on the grounds of the difficulties of comparing the iconic film text to verbal language.71 This sustains Metz’s famously elliptical pronouncement on the limitations of film language, namely that it ‘possesses a grammar, … but no vocabulary’.72 Metz can therefore be seen to take up Freud’s conception of the primary discourses of condensation and displacement as a means of surmounting the barrier between the graphic and the iconic: ‘on this level, where meaning becomes “pressure”, the gap between languages “with” and “without” words is no longer so crucial.’73 Metz’s ready dismissal of his characterisation of textual ornaments is unfortunate because he fails to perceive the ways in which his work on the surface levels of textuality challenges the division between the graphic and the iconic by undermining the concomitant binary of symbolic/literal. Metz draws on Jakobson who sets out the key principles of similarity and contiguity, which are said to operate on two different axes within language.74 On the semantic axis, the level of meaning indicated in terms of signifieds or referents, the principles take the form of metaphor and metonymy.75 A metaphor is thus based on similarity and Metz provides the example of the genius whose soaring heights resemble those attained by an eagle.76 Metonymy is based on contiguity, for example, naming the wine Bordeaux after its place of origin.77 The second axis is ­positional, and addresses the placing of an element within syntax or a discursive chain.78 Paradigm is based on resemblance, which enables one element to take the place of another. Syntagm is ­positional contiguity, where both elements are seen alongside each other. Metz takes up the distinction between the semantic and positional axes in order to distinguish between the positional con­tiguity that inevitably arises from the processes of film editing, here generally defined as the juxtaposition of one shot with another,79 and the semantic operations of metaphor and metonymy. In this way, a

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filmic figure is not just an accidental product of juxtaposition but requires putting into operation, a distinctive movement that constitutes the symbolic dimension of the iconic sign.80 On Metz’s model the two super-figures of metaphor and metonymy can be presented syntagmatically or paradigmatically, resulting in four options. His example of a metaphor presented syntagmatically is from Chaplin’s Modern Times in which a medium shot of a flock of sheep dissolves into a shot of a crowd exiting a subway station, the mode of transition briefly juxtaposing both images. A metaphor can also be presented paradigmatically, such as a visual image of flames replacing a love scene.81 Metz uses Fritz Lang’s M in his examples of metonymy. The sequence in which the little girl, Elsie, is given a balloon by the murderer is an example of a metonym presented syntagmatically in that both the child and the present are visible within the shot. The final image of the sequence, a low angle shot of the balloon caught in the telegraph wires is a metonym presented paradigmatically. Metz comments that this image also has overtones of a metaphor presented paradigmatically in that the balloon like the child has ‘something poignant and pathetic about it.’82 Importantly this transition from metonymy to metaphor is said to be characteristic of film symbolism. Metz argues that instances of pure metaphor are rare in film and that metaphor is frequently subordinated to metonym.83 For Elliott, this is the moment at which Metz renders film ‘incapable of effective figurative expression’.84 However, I would argue that he demonstrates that the purely iconic aspect of the film text, the visual image, is capable of complex figuration. Moreover, in arguing that film utilises metonymic contiguities as the basis of metaphorical relations, Metz challenges the supremacy of metaphor within classical rhetoric and the separation of metaphor and metonymy within structuralist linguistics. In this way, the process of applying the theoretical concepts to a different medium has resulted in significant changes to the rhetorical and linguistic models. As a result, Metz’s analysis of filmic symbolism cannot simply be dismissed as a backhanded way of valorising the written word. I have bothered to analyse Metz’s work in some detail because he provides a different way of solving one of Elliott’s most interesting conundrums, namely how might visual symbols set up verbal

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n­ arratives? While Elliott’s answer is to embrace cognitivism this really is not sufficient. The way in which the brain processes an image does not tell us what that image signifies, or to put it another way, the recognition that visual images might require conceptual processing is not synonymous with the elucidation of symbolic or conceptual meaning. Metz’s model is particularly useful for examining the ways in which specific objects within the mise-en-scène, such as props or costume, come to accrue meaning across a text, thereby creating symbolic narratives. This is exemplified at the end of M in which the murderer is identified by the blind man who sold him the balloon for Elsie. The blind man is carrying another balloon, identical in its anthropomorphic shape to the one previously given to the little girl. In the final confrontation the balloon takes up the metonymic and metaphoric relations to the specific child, Elsie, expanding them to become a metaphor for all the murdered children, its shape recalling them to the scene in a distorted spectral form. In this way, Metz’s model of filmic figuration also challenges accounts of the necessarily perceptual nature of the filmic image. McFarlane’s insistence that film’s ‘uncertain symbolic function works directly, sensuously, perceptually’ suggests that filmic signification has an immediacy that is not characteristic of verbal texts.85 However, an appreciation of the metaphoric significance of the balloon in the final confrontation in M cannot be regarded as purely perceptual or immediate, given that it is reliant upon the audience remembering and augmenting the symbolism established in the earlier scenes. The confrontation between the blind man and the murderer at the end of M also foregrounds the limitations of Metz’s system. The metaphorical symbolism of the balloon is reliant, at least in part, on two aspects that fall outside his theory: dialogue and performance. It is Peter Lorre’s horrified reaction to the balloon that makes its spectral aspect clear. In this way, the construction of the visual ­metaphor is also reliant on other elements within the scene. While the limitations of Metz’s account of cinematic signification have been extensively explored elsewhere, such critiques tend to follow Metz’s lines of argument rather than examining the more interesting ways in which he diverges from his stated aims. Critics have tended to broaden the scope of Metz’s claims, contending that every instance of filmic symbolism has to take the form of ­metaphor

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or metonymy, which leads to problems as, for example, all costume can be regarded as metonymic. However, Metz’s ­designation of metaphor and metonymy as specific ‘surface-structural taxonomies’ means that they do not have to cover all forms of filmic symbolism.86 The limited scope of Metz’s account of filmic figures means that it can be conjoined with Elliott’s broad account of filmic figuration. Both theorists provide the means to analyse the figural aspects of visual images, setting up models for analysing symbolic meaning that privilege patterns of resemblance. Elliott deliberately adopts the term ‘figural’ in place of ‘image’ or ‘imagery’ in order to broaden her discussion of filmic symbolism. The figural still refers to the purely iconic but also encompasses the additional verbal and aural elements of dialogue, music and sound. Having compared the relationship between words and pictures to that of a looking glass in which opposites inhere, Elliott builds on the metaphor comparing film to a ‘multi-faceted prism, as filmic figures run multifariously and complexly through the multiple channels of filmic signification (acting, costumes, props, sets, music, sound, dialogue, cinemato­ graphy, editing and more), creating figurative resonances every bit as dense as (one can even argue more dense than) literary figuration because of the many and varied sign systems film engages.’87 It is here that one can track the rather different ways in which Metz and Elliott would counter Woolf ’s contention that visual imagery constitutes ‘words of one syllable … Death is a hearse.’88 For Metz, as we have seen, a balloon is not just a balloon, a simple prop can accrue multiple metonymic and metaphorical resonances through its repeated appearances across a film text. Elliott focuses on the different contributions made by ‘elements of the image (acting, costume, sets and props) … ways of presenting the image (lighting, framing, camera angle and camera movement), … juxtapositions of images (the rhythms, disassociations, and connections of editing), and … accompaniments to the image (music and sound).’89 The symbolic elements of the mise-en-scène draw on a wide range of socio-cultural symbolism. Thus death is never just a hearse, the choice of vehicle would have socio-cultural implications, indicating wealth and status, while the ways in which it was lit and shot would add further dimensions to its symbolism. The

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presentation of Mozart’s funeral at the end of Amadeus offers a wealth of visual detail: the wooden cart transporting the coffin is decorated by a single piece of black fabric stretched across its four corner posts, and the basic, wooden coffin has iron handles and a swing door through which the body is finally deposited in a mass grave. The absence of funereal decoration shows the utterly impoverished nature of Mozart’s final circumstances. The details of the mise-en-scène form an ironic contrast to the richness of the musical accompaniment, the “Lachrymose” from Mozart’s Requiem, which uses full orchestra and choir. Importantly Metz’s and Elliott’s accounts of figuration challenge Saussurean models in which meaning is founded on difference. Metz distinguishes his model of filmic signification from Lacan’s accounts of language, arguing that his reliance on Saussure results in the privileging of binary opposition and difference.90 By contrast, Metz’s take up of Jakobson means that he utilises the principle of ‘comparability’, thus subordinating contrast to the general category of resemblance.91 Elliott’s final chapter draws on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and their filmic adaptations, setting out a dazzling array of looking glass analogies in order to challenge the logic of binary opposition that confines writing on adaptation to the stalemate of word versus image. The relation between a word and an image is thus reconceptualised as that of an object and its reflection. Positioned either side of a looking glass, opposites are no longer at war, but form complementary pairs exhibiting relations of difference and resemblance. Thus, words and images are seen to have inversely, inherent characteristics presented by the pictorial dimensions of linguistic imagery and the narratorial dimensions of visual figures.92 Literature and cinema can be seen to ‘contain and invert the otherness of each other … rather than being divided from each other by their otherness.’93 The point of differentiation (otherness) is thereby contained as a moment of contrast within the rubric of comparability, a frame set up by the form of the analogy itself, which is based on resemblance. Elliott’s use of looking glass analogies leads her to reformulate the relation between presence and absence, challenging Derridean deconstruction in which presence is an impossibility and absence necessarily ubiquitous. Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass

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offers an array of negations that reconstruct absence as a form of presence.94 Humpty Dumpty argues in favour of celebrating Unbirthdays and the White King responds to Alice’s comment that she ‘can see nobody on the road’ by praising her eyesight: ‘To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too!’95 Elliott quotes the beginning of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) in which the titular protagonist declares: ‘In my world everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it wasn’t.’96 The two parts of the second sentence demonstrate looking glass logic: the four middle words remain the same, while the first and last words are inverted into opposites. Elliott comments that following ‘conventional grammatical and mathematical rules that make two negatives a positive, the two mirrored antonyms form a synonym, turning negation into affirmation and difference … into inherent identity.’97 The example challenges the binary logics underpinning the deconstructive model in which the opposition of absence/presence is endlessly in the process of being reformulated and undone, indicating the impossibility of either negation or affirmation. By contrast Elliott’s ‘looking glass analogies turn negation and absence into a surplus presence: poetry and painting, words and images, aural and graphic elements of words, and pictorial and symbolic elements of pictures are both / and figures rather than the either / or of categorical differentiation or the neither / nor of deconstructive différance.’98 In this way, the analogical model, which is based on resemblance, can also be seen to privilege affirmation and presence. Having replaced the oppositional binary, words versus images, with an affirmative model of comparability, words and images, Elliott utilises looking glass logic in order to set up ‘a reciprocally transformative model of adaptation in which the film is not trans­ lation or copy, but rather metamorphoses the novel and is, in turn, metamorphosed by it.’99 Adaptation as metamorphosis is a ‘mutual and reciprocal inverse transformation’ that changes both parties.100 Elliott thus moves beyond the linear models that assert the temporal and cultural precedence of the ‘original’, offering a cyclical model that draws on the figure of the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Alice meets the Queen in the woods and returns her white shawl, which had blown away in the wind. The Queen

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converses with her about ‘living backwards’ which ‘always makes one a little giddy at first … but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.’ Alice remarks ‘I’m sure mine only works one way … I can’t remember things before they happen’ to meet with the reply ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’.101 The White Queen is able to remember events before they happen, screaming in advance of her finger being pricked by the pin that holds her shawl, and responding to the actual injury calmly, commenting ‘I’ve done all the screaming already’.102 The White Queen later metamorphoses into a sheep, a transformation that involves two temporal regressions: from human to animal and knitted shawl to sheep wool. However, Elliott comments ‘the metamorphosis is not a straight linear regression, for the sheep is knitting – perhaps the very shawl that the White Queen has worn / will wear.’103 Adaptation as metamorphosis exhibits the same inversions of temporality. ‘Like the memory that works both ways, the facing mirrors of novel and film under a looking glass analogical model of adaptation reflect both ways, distorting sequences of origin and copy.’104 The adaptation sets up new ways of returning to the ‘original’, which, in turn, engenders new ways of approaching the adaptation, beginning a series of potentially infinite inversions of linear temporality. In the same way, the sheep’s new-found hobby of knitting inverts causal logic in that it refers to the shawl that it once was/will become. It is at this point that Elliott is closest to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, an endless cycle of differential repetition. ‘Looking glass analogies reverberate in an endless return to origins and a transformation of those origins through the act of returning, a return that is always original.’105 Elliott’s solutions to the binary oppositions of word/image, symbolic/literal that have dominated debates on adaptation, involve focusing on the figural in a number of different ways. She offers a riot of metaphors through which to reconceptualise the relations between words and images: from looking glass analogies, to filmic signification as a prism, to adaptation as metamorphosis. The looking glass can take the form of an object and its reflection or two mirrors face to face. The latter offers an infinite series of reflections and refractions – a final analogy for the multiform nature of the myriad potential inter-relations between words and images that

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are yet to be formulated.106 Here the meaning of the figural shifts from the utilisation of specific forms of analogy to general analyses of literary and filmic symbolism. Elliott positions her looking glass analogies inside and outside theory. They are both a way out of the problems created by structuralism and deconstruction, the short cut that Disney’s Alice finds sending her out of the Tulgey Woods, and the means of effecting theoretical change.107 This ambivalence results from Elliott’s repeated attempts to distance herself from the linguistic theories on which she is reliant. However, as I have demonstrated, her solutions are congruent with aspects of structuralist linguistics and consequently her analogies must be regarded as theoretically laden. Elliott does not attempt to address the ways in which filmic figuration in its broad sense might have theoretical implications. While she proves that film is definitely capable of complex figuration, it is Le Doeuff who provides the means to link the figural and the theoretical. If traditional conceptions of the novel/film debate revolve around word/image wars waged by the two different media, Le Doeuff ’s pioneering work, The Philosophical Imaginary, examines the presentation of these oppositions within a single medium, philosophical texts. Philosophy is said to construct its own meta-discourse about the true nature of philosophical writing, defined as rational, logical, conceptual, abstract and utilising reasoned ­argument.108 ‘This metadiscourse regularly affirms the non-philosophical nature of thought in images’, such as stories, myths, fables, and all poetic language, including analogy and metaphor.109 Given the explicit exclusion of imagery from philosophical writing, Le Doeuff argues that its continual recurrence within such texts constitutes an ‘inner scandal.’110 Philosophical texts are therefore said to be at war with themselves, pitting the logical, abstract form of the Logos against the vivid, pictorial form of imagery. Le Doeuff argues that philosophy resolves its ‘inner scandal’ by disowning textual imagery, which involves ‘projecting the shameful face of philosophy onto an Other.’111 As the product of Other discourses, imagery is positioned outside the ‘true’ philosophical text itself. The process of exclusion takes one of two forms, which Le Doeuff entitles the upstream and downstream hypo­ theses. Dispatched upstream, imagery becomes ‘the resurgence of a

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p­ rimitive soul, of archaic or infantile thought, of an uneducated … part of the mind.’112 In this case, representatives of the Other include: the common people with their superstitious fondness for folklore and myths, and the figure of the child, whom Le Doeuff genders male wryly noting, ‘we have all been one, before becoming … a man!’113 The characterisation of the image as primitive and infantile sustains a conception of philosophy as civilised and adult, a realm of pure reason that will be the domain of adult males only. Interestingly, these binary oppositions are repeated in the battle between the new medium of cinema and literary modernism, resulting in the denigration of the filmic image as biologically and psychologically primitive.114 Within philosophy, the definition of imagery as the product of the discourses of an archaic/infantile Other means that it constitutes a ‘radically heterogeneous’ element within philosophical texts, which, in turn, generates the argument that it should be entirely expunged from truly philosophical writing.115 In the downstream hypothesis, imagery operates as a translation of philosophical arguments and terminology, speaking ‘directly … to a destined interlocutor who is still uncultivated by concepts and ignorant of philosophy’.116 In this case, the Other is the audience of less able readers who are conceptualised as non-philosophers. The imagery simply serves to translate ‘the corpus of concepts … into the Other’s language’; as such it is ‘completely isomorphous with’ the philosophical text, its meaning entirely absorbed into it.117 This argument has a clear parallel within adaptation theory in which film is viewed as ‘an addendum’ to the literary text, acting as a bridge that makes the original accessible to the uneducated viewer.118 As has been demonstrated in chapter one, assessments of The Matrix Trilogy as good introductions to philosophy commonly utilise this form of argument. Importantly, for Le Doeuff the upstream and downstream hypotheses both position the image in same way: ‘the status of an element within philosophical work is denied it. It is not part of the enterprise.’119 Le Doeuff comments that the characterisation of imagery as entirely extraneous to or a mere duplication of philosophical discourse begs the question of its continued presence within philosophical texts. She argues that the ubiquitous nature of the figural means that it must play an unacknowledged role within philosophy,

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setting out two possible variants. The first version draws on deconstruction, identifying imagery as one of the key ‘points of tension’ within philosophical texts.120 Here imagery ‘occupies the space of theory’s impossible’ and is thus associated with the problems posed by philosophical writing, constituting the point at which such texts turn back on themselves.121 While this means that any absolute differentiation between philosophy and imagery is impossible, the latter is conceptualised as a form of textual excess, which undermines and disrupts the theoretical enterprise rather than making a positive contribution to it. The second version is broader, images are said to ‘work both for and against the system that deploys them.’122 While imagery retains a disruptive dimension, this is balanced by a more positive role as the provider of ‘something the system cannot itself justify, but which is nevertheless needed for its proper working.’123 As a result, imagery becomes more than a form of textual excess that simply undermines theory, it is a constitutive part of philosophy, standing ‘in a relation of solidarity with the theoretical enterprise itself (and with its troubles) it is … at work in these productions.’124 Le Doeuff ’s analysis of Kant’s use of the image of the northern isle in The Critique of Pure Reason exemplifies the doubled capacity of imagery. The use of the metaphor across the text ‘works towards the coherence of the system’, ensuring the overall consistency of the project, but at the same time, its repeated use highlights ‘the troubles of the system’ through its links to elements that the theory explicitly repudiates.125 While Le Doeuff acknowledges that the imagery of the northern isle occurs in the earliest drafts of Kant’s text, suggesting its crucial role in the theorising to follow, her reading of the metaphor subordinates its creative capacity – the production of coherence – to its disruptive potential – the myriad ways in which it undermines the system. In contrast, my previous take up of Le Doeuff ’s work has tended to focus on the constructive role played by images, expanding her position to suggest that imagery constitutes the means by which theoretical concepts are created and expressed.126 Importantly, if imagery plays a crucial role in the creation of theory, then the creation of new figures becomes a powerful means of effecting theoretical change.127 My expansion of Le Doeuff provides

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a different context in which to appreciate Elliott’s figural solutions to the problems of adaptation theory. The plurality of metaphors, from looking glass analogies to adaptation as metamorphosis, all attest to the capacity of imagery to challenge long-standing theoretical traditions by setting up new models of possible inter-relations between words and images. The interlinking of the figural and the theoretical presented by these specific figures stands as a key example of thinking in images. If Le Doeuff ’s work can be used to provide a theoretical context for Elliott’s solutions, then conversely and reciprocally, Elliott’s work on adaptation offers a theoretical context for Le Doeuff ’s analysis of philosophical imagery. Le Doeuff argues that philosophical texts utilise imagery from a wide variety of sources. She sets out a model of feedback loops demonstrating the ways in which philosophy draws on wider social discourses, including myths, legends, literature and art, in order to create its own imagery. An example would be Plato’s use of Orphic myths in The Phaedo. While philosophy borrows from other discourses, its texts can, in turn, be transformed back into popular culture. Le Doeuff gives the example of Riçala, a philosophical novel by Ibn Tufayl that formed the basis of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.128 Importantly, each transition from one discourse to another involves a significant transformation of the imagery.129 Once within philosophy, the imagery becomes crucial to the development of the concomitant theoretical system, thus Plato’s use of Greek mythology cannot simply be seen as ‘a “survival”, a residue of popular thought’ because the myths are themselves changed by the process of being taken up. In the same way, the transformation of philosophical imagery into popular literature involves changes that need to be charted positively, ‘we must be … on guard against the … philosophicocentric [sic] proposition which regards “popular culture” as a by-product of the degradation of products of learning.’130 Le Doeuff ’s brief comments on the transformation of imagery can usefully be conjoined with Elliott’s sophisticated model of adaptation as metamorphosis. Combined, the pair provide the means of charting the metamorphosis of the conceptual/ theore­tical dimensions of imagery in each transition from one discourse to another. Elliott also provides a means of addressing

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Le Doeuff ’s main project – the delineation of a specific ‘philosophical ­imaginary’ by charting the changes made to key images across different philosophical texts. These textual borrowings and reworkings can be understood as forms of adaptation that set up a complex series of inter-relations between different theorists. As suggested earlier, Plato’s famous account of the image as a false illusion that is defined as the opposite of goodness and truth is sustained through the analogy of the cave as well as a series of metaphors: the image as copy, reflection, ghost and shadow. These figures are taken up and reworked by Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard argues that the current postmodern era is caused by an excessive version of capitalist consumption. Advertising has overcome its proscribed role as the means of marketing specific commodities, becoming the defining feature of the public domain. Baudrillard’s analysis of the underground shopping mall of the Forum des Halles in Paris reworks the analogy of the cave for our time. ‘Gone the happy and displayed commodity, now that it flees the sun, and suddenly it is like a man who has lost his shadow. Thus the Forum des Halles closely resembles a funeral home – the funereal luxury of a commodity buried, transparent, in a black sun. Sarcophagus of the commodity.’131 Plato’s cave has become a sealed tomb for the commodity with no possibility of exit. The metaphor of the ‘black sun’ conjoins sun and shadow, indicating that there is no longer any opposition between truth and illusion. In a characteristic reversal, what Baudrillard mourns in this passage is not the impossibility of truth but the loss of illusion. Thus the commodity resembles a man who has lost his shadow – lost the ability to appreciate lies and illusion. This metaphor is then expanded on the next page. ‘The only amusing idea in the whole thing is precisely the human and his shadow who walk in trompe l’oeil on the vertical dais of concrete … this wall lives without having wished to, in contrast to the family vault of haute couture and prêt-à-porter that constitutes the Forum. This shadow is beautiful because it is an allusion in contrast to the inferior world that has lost its shadow.’132 The last line offers two key changes to Plato’s metaphor, in this case the shadow is a thing of beauty and moreover it is not synonymous with illusion. If the ‘black sun’ of the Forum irons out the difference between truth and illusion, the reappearance of the shadow

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can only function as an allusion – a gesture back to a golden era when illusion was a possibility. Importantly, focusing on the role played by imagery in philosophical texts enables an appreciation of the complex theoretical dimensions of Baudrillard’s image-laden prose. This reappraisal of Baudrillard’s writing style is vital because the general failure to engage with his use of figurative language has led to his dismissal as a pseudo-philosopher. Indeed, a number of theorists have preferred to view his prose as fiction; however, the quality of the writing still remains problematic. Norman Denzin argues that ‘Baudrillard shares a vision and a fate with other science fiction writers. The visual effects are terrific but the narrative doesn’t work.’133 Richard Hanley’s painful attempts to read the first essay in Simulacra and Simulation culminate in his assessment of it as ‘a cautionary tale of some sort – that we in some meaningful sense have lost touch with reality.’134 He goes on to lament ‘But then all the obscure prose just seems unnecessary.’135 The use of metaphor is therefore said to obscure the text’s true meaning, which is actually very simple. In contrast, I would argue that Hanley’s refusal to engage with the details of the figural language obliterates the philosophical dimensions of the text. Simulacra and Simulation without metaphors is not Baudrillard made simple – it is not Baudrillard. Other writers, such as David Weberman, take a different approach, providing a neat series of propositions that purport to summarise the postmodern position.136 In this way quotations are kept to a minimum and there is no endeavour to engage with details such as writing style.137 Unfortunately the loss of the figural also takes out the key means of linking the philosophy with the films, resulting in reductive readings of both types of texts. While the figurative aspects of philosophical and filmic texts are not identical: the pictorial dimensions of words and the visual/ verbal/aural multitrack of film, focusing on the figural offers common strategies for reading both types of text. The following three chapters will trace the theoretical implications of key figures in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and the ways in which they are taken up and reworked across The Matrix Trilogy. Importantly, a careful delineation of the metamorphoses undergone by key figures will enable the articulation of the philosophical project

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of the films themselves. I am not interested in using the trilogy to offer a critique of Baudrillard – this has been done many times and always results in questionable and limited readings of the films.138 The textual analysis will focus on the constructive effects of the imagery, tracing the ways in which they express particular concepts and arguments, rather than setting out deconstructive analyses of the ways in which images work for and against the theory. The films will be seen to both utilise and move beyond Baudrillard’s work, setting out a philosophical position of their own. For Elliott, the White Queen’s metamorphosis into a sheep knitting the shawl that the Queen once wore/will wear sets up a cyclical model of inter-relations between adaptation and original, a transformation that ensures that each return to the original is a moment in which it is viewed afresh.139 In the same way, thinking through the filmic adaptation of a particular philosophical text, requires us to think of philosophy itself as a form of adaptation. Thus, setting the scene for a productive encounter between The Matrix Trilogy and Baudrillard changes the way in which we view Baudrillard’s work, which in turn, alters our appreciation of the trilogy.

Notes 1 K. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 2, 4, 73, 80, 134–5, 184, 194–5. 2 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 222, 224, 232, 234. 3 M. Le Doeuff, ‘Preface: the shameful face of philosophy’, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. C. Gordon (London: Athlone Press, 1989), pp. 1–20. 4 C. Constable, Thinking in Images: Film Theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich (London: British Film Institute, 2005) pp. 29–37, 50–1. C. Constable, ‘Baudrillard reloaded: interrelating philosophy and film via The Matrix Trilogy’, Screen, 47:2 (2006), pp. 233–8, 249. 5 R. Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, in R. Stam and A. Raengo (eds), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 7. 6 Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, p. 4. 7 Despite their attempts to separate theory and criticism into different chapters, both Cardwell and Elliott wind up discussing theory in their chapters on criticism. See chapter 5 of Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate and chapter 2 in S. Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 8 M. Le Doeuff, ‘Long hair, short ideas’, The Philosophical Imaginary, p. 101.

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Adapting philosophy/philosophy as adaptation  65 9 Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, p. 5, and Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 35. 10 Plato, The Republic, ed. and trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1987) p. 425. 11 Ibid., p. 423. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 424. 14 Ibid., p. 426. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., pp. 317 and 318 respectively. 17 Ibid., p. 321. 18 D. Lee’s introduction to the simile of the cave, Plato, The Republic, p. 316. See also Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, pp. 5, 47 fn. 8. 19 Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 35. Quotation from D. J. Enright, Fields of Vision: Essays on Literature, Language and Television (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 8. 20 Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, pp. 33–5. 21 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 104–5, first published 1757. 22 See Derrida’s reading of Plato in Spurs, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 87, 97, 101. 23 Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, p. 6. 24 Ibid., p. 7. 25 Virginia Woolf, ‘The cinema’, in Collected Essays: volume 2 (London: Hogarth, 1966) p. 271, quoted in Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 54. 26 Ibid. 27 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 54. 28 Ibid., p. 219. 29 Ibid., pp. 161–72. Elliott devotes a section of chapter 5 to the discussion of ‘the incarnational concept of adaptation’. 30 Ibid., p. 162. 31 Ibid., p. 161. 32 Ibid., p. 167. 33 Ibid. 34 Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, p. 4. 35 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 9–10. 36 Ibid., p. 10. 37 This is Elliott’s gloss of Bluestone’s position. Ibid., p. 11. 38 Ibid., p. 13. 39 Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 58. 40 B. McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 13. 41 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 13. 42 McFarlane, Novel to Film, pp. 26–7. Elliott argues that the re-emergence of the

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43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52



53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70

71 72

conceptual/perceptual binary can also be traced back to Lessing; Elliott, ­Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 13. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 64. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., pp. 4, 184, 195. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 195. I have to thank Suzanne Speidel for alerting me to this point. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 195. Woolf, ‘The cinema’, p. 270, quoted in Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p.  195. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 28. For a discussion of the usefulness of structuralist and post-structuralist theories in adaptation see Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, pp. 8–9. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 6, 80–1. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid. Ibid. Elliott’s fondness for this quote is suggested by the fact that she repeats the passage in which it occurs. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 65, 216. Ibid., pp. 216, 221–2. Ibid., pp. 215–16. Ibid., p. 221. My italics. Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 27. Elliott also has two references to Metz’s Film Language in this chapter, however, these occur in her discussion of cinematic realism and I wish to focus on her discussion of filmic figuration. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 218, 274 fn. 68 and fn. 70. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 217. Ibid., p. 219. C. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. C. Britton … [et al.] (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 215, quoted in Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 224. C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: An Imaginary Signifier, trans. C. Britton … [et al.] (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), p. 152. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid. The first part may be said to comprise pp. 151–211 and the second part comprises pp. 212–296. Ibid., p. 270. It is to be noted that Metz does not follow Lacan’s formulation in which metaphor and metonymy incorporate the processes of condensation and displacement respectively. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 217. Ibid., p. 213.

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Adapting philosophy/philosophy as adaptation  67 73 Ibid., p. 219. 74 Ibid., p. 175. Jakobson sets out four axes of language and Metz focuses on the two that are conjoined with the super-figures of metaphor and metonymy. 75 Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 183. 76 Ibid., p. 185. 77 Ibid., p. 154. 78 Ibid., p. 183. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., p. 198. 81 Ibid., p. 189. 82 Ibid., p. 190. 83 Ibid., pp. 197–205. 84 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 217. 85 McFarlane, Novel to Film, pp. 27. 86 Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 219. 87 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 232–3, my italics. 88 Woolf, ‘The cinema’, p. 270, quoted in Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p.  195. 89 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 234. 90 Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 180. 91 Ibid., p. 181. 92 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 211. Elliott’s exact formulation of the inverse logics of words and images reads: ‘the reciprocal power of words to evoke mental images and of pictures to evoke verbal figures in cognition.’ I have taken out the cognitivist element and rephrased the line so that it is in keeping with my focus on literary and filmic symbolism. 93 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 212. 94 Ibid., p. 187. 95 L. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (London: Puffin Books, 1997), pp. 236, 249. 96 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 212. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., p. 215. The first set of italics are my own. 99 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 229. 100 Ibid. 101 Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, pp. 216–17. 102 Ibid., pp. 218–19. 103 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 230. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., p. 244. 107 Ibid., p. 223. 108 Le Doeuff, ‘Preface: the shameful face of philosophy’, pp. 1, 6. 109 Ibid., p. 6. 110 Ibid.

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68  Adapting philosophy 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137 138

139

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 52–4. Le Doeuff, ‘Preface: the shameful face of philosophy’, p. 7. Ibid. Ibid. Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, pp. 38–9. Le Doeuff, ‘Preface: the shameful face of philosophy’, p. 7. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 17. Constable, ‘Baudrillard reloaded’, pp. 237, 249. I trace the ways in which Irigaray’s use of the image of the ‘burning glass’ challenges the equation of reason and vision in the Western philosophical tradition in Thinking in Images, pp. 47–50. Le Doeuff, ‘Preface: the shameful face of philosophy’, p. 19. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 20. J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 93. Ibid., p. 94. N. Denzin, Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema (London: Sage, 1991), p. 34. R. Hanley, ‘Simulacra and Simulation: Baudrillard and The Matrix’, essay added to the official website on 19/12/03. http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com (accessed 3/3/04). Ibid. D. Weberman, ‘The Matrix: simulation and the postmodern age’, in W. Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), p.  227. Weberman provides two quotations from Baudrillard’s work see pp. 226–7 fn. 2 and p. 236. See particularly, Hanley, ‘Simulacra and Simulation:’ and A. Gordon, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur?’, in G. Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2003), pp. 102–23. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 230.

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3

Mirrors and screens

O

ne of the key motifs in Simulacra and Simulation is the figure of the double. It appears in seven of the eighteen chapters and is used in the detailed analysis of a range of topics: from cinema to cloning.1 The figure is a vehicle for a series of important metaphors as well as encapsulating key logical moves that are repeated throughout the book. The first references to the double occur during Baudrillard’s characterisation of the hyperreal.2 The book begins with a discussion of the ‘Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire drew up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly’.3 The map acts as a precise double, mirroring the collapse of the Empire by fraying and decaying. Baudrillard notes that ‘this fable has now come full circle for us’.4 Inverting the traditional causal relation between reality and the image, the map no longer acts as a copy of a prior reality; instead it recreates the real as a copy of the map, thereby engendering the hyperreal. Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory … .5

The precession of simulacra, of the model, means that everything is said to appear as its own double. ‘Everywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original – things are doubled by their own scenario.’6 Baudrillard comments that within folklore the appearance of the double prefigures the protagonist’s impending death;

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however, binaries such as life/death have no place within the hyperreal, which dissolves all opposition. ‘But this double does not mean, as in folklore, the imminence of death – they are already purged of death, and are even better than in life; more smiling, more authentic, in [the] light of their model, like the faces in funeral parlors.’7 While the hyperreal dissolves the distinction between life and death, it is to be noted that Baudrillard’s final simile privileges death, the smiling population resembles the expertly made up, chilled faces of corpses. In a later chapter entitled ‘The Remainder’ Baudrillard provides a cinematic example of the folkloric relation between the double and death. In The Student of Prague, the protagonist’s mirror image gains a life of its own, operating as an evil doppelganger who commits murder.8 In the final duel the protagonist kills his doppelganger thereby simultaneously killing himself. Baudrillard’s brief comment on the ending focuses on the mirror, suggesting that it acts as the means of both doubling and death: ‘the image broken by the mirror brings with it the immediate death of the hero’.9 The mirror can therefore be seen to act as a barrier, a visual demarcation of the division between the protagonist and his doppelganger, whose destruction marks the death of both self and other.10 While Baudrillard goes on to allege that the same ‘classic sequence’ is played out in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Shadow, the tale actually ends very differently.11 The shadow marries the princess while the learned gentleman to whom he once belonged is put to death.12 While Baudrillard does not trace the links, the doubling presented in The Shadow is structured around a series of reversals. Having detached himself from the learned gentleman, the shadow embarks on a life of his own using the unethical techniques of spying and blackmail for economic gain, passing for a person of high social status. In contrast the learned gentleman fails to find a market for his work and becomes ill, causing people to comment: ‘“You really look like a shadow of yourself ”’.13 The reversal of socioeconomic positions is explicitly presented as an inversion of traditional subject/object relations. ‘The shadow was the master and the master was the shadow.’14 The shadow takes the learned gentleman to a spa to recover and on their journey the scholar becomes the

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shadow’s shadow taking up the appropriate position in relation to the sun overhead. The reversal is compounded by the shadow addressing ‘his former master by his first name’, while insisting that the scholar address him as ‘sir’.15 The tale does not end with the death of both characters, which would obliterate their oppositional relation. While the shadow remains insubstantial, he knows when the princess falls in love with him ‘because it seemed as if she could look right through him’;16 his accrual of the socio-economic ­privileges of the role of master enable him to have the scholar imprisoned and declared mad. Baudrillard’s argument that the shadow, like the mirror image, acts as a remainder is underpinned by two key logical moves: reversion and reversal. Defining the remainder as ‘something that can fall from the body, just like hair, excrement, or nail clippings …’ Baudrillard parallels the role of the shadow in ‘archaic magic’ and its status as a metaphor of the soul that ‘gives meaning to the subject’.17 He argues that it is the construction of an opposition between the body and its shadow/reflection that underpins the conception of the body as a real, objective, material, point of reference. ‘Without an image or without a shadow, the body becomes a transparent nothing, it is itself nothing but a remainder.’18 This ‘reversion of the shadow onto the body’ is brought about by the obliteration of opposition in which the positive element – the body as real object – is dissolved into its negative – shadow/reflection.19 Reversion is the result of a reversal of traditional subject/object relations: ‘this fallout of the essential, by the terms of the essential’ is brought about by apparently insignificant details, such as nail clippings.20 The defeat of the essential by the insignificant ‘creates the charm, the beauty and the disquieting strangeness of these stories.’21 For Baudrillard, the reversals that underpin the key moment of reversion demonstrate the intersubstitutional nature of both parts of the binary. Thus the remainder is ‘the very figure of reversibility’ because it symbolises the fundamental equivalence of crucial oppositions, specifically: masculine/feminine and life/death.22 This rendering equivalent of opposing terms is an opportunity for laughter. ‘The remainder is obscene, because it is reversible and is exchanged for itself. It is obscene and makes one laugh, as only the lack of distinction between masculine and feminine, the lack of

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distinction between life and death makes one laugh, deeply laugh.’23 Earlier in the paragraph, Baudrillard personifies the remainder, commenting that it ‘runs infinitely after its own slash, after its own double, like Peter Schlemihl after his shadow’.24 This race after the slash that signifies the relation of binary opposition, ‘/’, is an attempt to revive the very possibility of opposition that is doomed to fail. The resulting simulation of opposition only reinforces the underlying lack of distinction between the key terms. Baudrillard’s descriptions of the double as shadow, reflection and copy take up key metaphors from Plato’s writing on the image. As demonstrated in chapter two, Plato’s view of representational art as reflections of the physical world that have no relation to the true Form, also generates the figure of the image as ‘an apparition’.25 In the same way, Baudrillard’s analysis of the double stresses the spectral nature of its many forms. ‘In other words, the imaginary power and wealth of the double … rests on its immateriality, on the fact that it is and remains a phantasm.’26 While both theorists define the image in terms that stress its lack of substance, each offers a different overall argument. For Plato, the spectral nature of the image is the result of its being a copy of a copy, an imitation of a physical world that is itself merely a shadow of the real world of the Forms. Although Baudrillard takes up the language of the spectral, the immateriality of the double is secured by placing it in direct opposition to the materiality of the real, physical world. Moreover, focusing on the double enables Baudrillard to encompass the original remit of Plato’s metaphors, representational art, while expanding it to include all fiction and self/other relations. As the double is defined as a phantasm, attempts to revive lost doubles through re-establishing binary oppositions are characterised as the resurrection of phantoms. The double as mirror image stands as the fictional reflection of the real world. The figure belongs to a time when the image had a clear representational role. Baudrillard’s analysis of the cinematic image begins by characterising it as a reflection of the last vestiges of reality, before moving on to view it as the means through which reality is annihilated thereby establishing the hyperreal;27 ‘the cinema and its trajectory: from the most fantastic or mythical to the realistic and the hyperrealistic.’28 Having reduced the world to a copy of a cinematic image, cinema then

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seeks to revive the oppositional terms of material historical reality through the provision of remakes that exhibit meticulous attention to historical detail.29 In this way, attempts to revive a historical past simply result in imagistic reconstructions that annihilate the possibility of returning to the past. ‘Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.’30 The trajectory of the cinema can be rephrased: from spectral double to the doubling of the spectral. Baudrillard’s analysis of the double also draws on elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the mirror stage is a first step in the construction of the subject, prior to its full formation through the immersion into language. The mirror stage marks the beginning of the sense of the self as a unity, which is separate from the figure of the mother.31 Baudrillard’s comments take up the construction of the mirror image as mother/other, while adding in the spectral qualities of the double: ‘the double is … an imaginary figure, which just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again, which haunts the subject like a subtle and always averted death.’32 On the Lacanian model the subject is internally divided against itself, composed through and by its relations to others: images and language. For Baudrillard, the endless interplay between the subject and its double is staged across a divide between two differential spaces, visually represented by the mirror itself. The mirror thus acts as the slash of opposition between the substantial real/insubstantial spectral. The interplay between self and other ends ‘when the double materializes’ because its substantial form nullifies the opposing binaries, thus indicating the ‘imminent death’ of both terms.33 The fundamental role played by binary opposition informs Baudrillard’s model of self/other relations, simplifying the Lacanian model in which the other has a constitutive role within the subject. Moreover, Baudrillard reworks Lacan’s internal schism at the heart of the subject as an external, specular division that sets up differential spaces. In Simulacra and Simulation the double, particularly the mirror image, operates as a privileged metaphor of binary opposition and spatial differentiation, both of which are eliminated within the

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hyperreal. The process of elimination is demonstrated by comparing two different media: cinema – here cast in a representational role – and television. Baudrillard argues that cinema ‘still retains something of the double, of the phantasm, of the mirror, of the dream’.34 Moreover, the division between reality and the cinematic image is said to secure its status as ‘an image’. In contrast television ‘is nothing but a screen, not even that: a miniaturized terminal that, in fact, is immediately located in your head – you are the screen, and the TV watches you – it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape – a tape, not an image.’35 The opposition of image/tape should not be read too literally. It does not mean that there is no place for the filmic image within the hyperreal.36 Indeed, Baudrillard’s conception of the hyperreal is heavily reliant on the image.37 Importantly, the cinematic image is characterised by distance, its role of double/mirror setting up a division between the real and cinematic spaces, whereas the televisual tape plays ­immediately in the head. The loss of distance fundamentally transforms the oppositional subject/object relation. The medium of television thus effects a series of reversals, transforming the subject who looks into the mirror into the object of the gaze – ‘the TV watches you’.38 These reversals ultimately constitute a point of reversion in that the subject becomes an object, taking the form of a terminal or screen. The double can therefore be seen to set up a crucial opposition between two highly figurative objects: the mirror and the screen. Moreover, the description of the television as both screen and terminal clearly links it to another important device, the computer. The use of the word ‘terminal’ has overtones of death that are appropriate to Baudrillard’s conception of the hyperreal. Importantly, all these objects have high symbolic and philosophical value, playing a key role in the conceptualisation of representation, the real, the hyperreal, and variant forms of subject/object relations. At a metacritical level they also symbolise the impossibility of returning to the object in itself, each one is always already imbued with the fictions and arguments that it helps to sustain. The film reading that follows will explore the ways in which the trilogy utilises these key objects, considering how the figurative aspect of their presentation within the films takes up and expands Baudrillard’s concepts

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and arguments thereby contributing to the creation of the trilogy’s distinctive theoretical position. The first reference to Neo in The Matrix positions him as the unseen object of Trinity’s gaze. The telephone conversation between Cypher and Trinity forms a voice-over accompaniment to a slow zoom in onto a computer. The screen displays moving vertical lines of green figures as it sorts through different combinations, tracing the source of the call. Cypher opens the exchange, commenting: ‘You like him, don’t you? You like watching him.’ An assertion Trinity instantly denies as ‘ridiculous’. This first reference constructs Neo as an object, both of discussion and the gaze, which is compounded by his initial on-screen presentation. The scene begins when the camera appears to emerge through the digital letter ‘a’ on a computer screen, pulling out to show the word ‘Searching’. There is a cut from a close-up of the left quadrant of the screen continually scrolling down, to a close-up of Neo asleep on the desk illuminated by the light and dark blocks of text playing across his face and shoulder, followed by another close-up of the screen. The editing of the three shots suggests that the second can be read as a POV shot, taken from the computer’s viewpoint. It thus presents a reversal of traditional subject/object relations, retaining the conceptual implications of Baudrillard’s analysis of the television, only here ‘the [computer] watches you’.39 Importantly, the computer’s projection of light onto Neo can also be read as a moment of reversion in that it clearly constructs him as another screen. The sense of Neo as machinic is sustained within the scene – his sleeping figure forms one of the array of machines set up on his circular desk. The revolving overhead shot positions him within the curving arc of technology, rather than presenting him as its differentiated, stable, human centre. The film’s presentation of reversion, the hero as screen/machine, is effected by lighting, editing, camera angles and the arrangement of the mise-en-scène. The initial construction of the reversible and reciprocal relations between Neo and the computer draws directly on Simulacra and Simulation. The hero awakens the moment that the words ‘Wake up, Neo …’ appear on the screen, sitting up to read the command that he has already obeyed. The instantaneous connection between Neo and the computer presents him as another terminal, an outlet for

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the computer’s commands. Neo’s response to the computer rapidly changes from sleepy surprise to puzzled incredulity on receiving a second unsolicited message. The reversal of traditional subject/ object relations is played out once again. There are two POV shots of the computer screen in which the unexpectedly animated object of Neo’s gaze spells out: ‘The Matrix has you …’. Neo then presses the keys marked ‘ctrl’, ‘x’ and ‘esc’ in an effort to regain control and the computer ignores his commands. The Matrix utilises the figurative objects of the mirror and television screen in the presentation of Neo’s arrest and interrogation by the agents. The film draws on Baudrillard’s analysis of the function of the television in the hypermarket, in which the screen’s capacity for reversing the relations between the subject and object of the gaze is linked to surveillance. The ‘“policing” television … looks at you, you look at yourself in it … it is the mirror without silvering (tain) in the activity of consumption, a game of splitting in two and doubling that closes this world on itself.’40 The doubling of consumers enacted by the television screen can be compared to the role of the cinematic image within the hyperreal. Each offers a doubling of the spectral that serves to emphasise the radical equivalence of both halves of the binary. In the case of the closed circuit television the spectral consumer and its insubstantial image are both equal participants in the act of consumption. The doubling does not set up a figure of an opposing other – like the shadow, reflection or mirror image – it divides the world of consumption in on itself, offering more of the same. Thus the television screen as a ‘mirror without silvering’ is a figure of enclosure and entrapment. Neo’s arrest is shown in a brief long shot in which he looks over his left shoulder while being escorted from his office building to a car by two agents. There is a cut to a medium shot in which the round, convex, wing mirror of Trinity’s motorbike is positioned centrally. It acts as both mirror and screen, reversing the direction in which Neo glances, while replaying his walk to the car in slow motion. The next long shot is taken from behind the mirror, showing Agent Smith in the background looking towards the motorbike and its as yet unseen rider. The camera immediately pans left to show Trinity responding with an expletive and there is a cut to a medium shot of her taking off on the bike. The film’s presentation of a relay of

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looks effectively undoes the binary hierarchy of subject/object of the gaze. The viewer of the mirror, Trinity, is only shown on-screen once she becomes the object of Agent Smith’s enquiring gaze. For Baudrillard, the transition from the gaze to general surveillance marks the end of any straightforward ownership of the look. In the same way, the film’s confusion of who is watching whom means that surveillance is not attached to one specific person or group – it appears to be an endemic feature of the matrix. The medium shot of Trinity on her bike is followed by a medium shot of a bank of televisions whose convex curved screens echo the shape of her wing mirror. The closed circuit television camera pans right and left, showing Neo sitting at a desk in a white room. There is a slow zoom in to the central television, which draws attention to the play of vertical lines on the screens. They trace a repeated pattern from dark, perfectly straight bars that are positioned close together to ribbons of rainbow colours that splay out forming curved concave lines in a mirror image of the screen’s surface. The horizontal movement of the bars is repeated four times and its effect is to present the screens as flexing, three-dimensional spaces. The continual reconfiguration of the bars across the screen suggests that it constitutes a means of imprisonment, as if the white room beyond were part of the screen space. This is reinforced by the seamless editing of the zoom in on the central television with the digital transition through the screen, forming a single movement into the room where Neo is imprisoned. Importantly, the scene offers the first presentation of passing through a flexing television screen, which comes to form a key motif across the trilogy. While the use of the screen as a means of accessing and con­­ structing the space of the prison provides a narrative context that expands Baudrillard’s metaphor of entrapment, the scene within the prison also takes up the motif of doubling within the hyperreal. The rectangular shape of Agent Smith’s dark sunglasses recalls the bank of television screens. Each lens acts as a mirror/screen, providing two images of the key objects in the room: Neo and the thick file listing his misdeeds. The doubling is also sustained by the dialogue. Agent Smith divides his interlocutor into two figures: the law-abiding Thomas Anderson, a tireless worker for the computer company; and the lawless Neo, computer hacker. However, the

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delineation of ‘two lives’ operates as a parody of oppositional differentiation designed to give Neo the ‘choice’ of becoming Thomas Anderson. In the same way, Agent Smith’s removal of his sunglasses in order to differentiate himself from his fellow agents while he asks for Neo’s cooperation in capturing Morpheus has the reverse effect. The appeal to Neo’s finer feelings is delivered with a precise, slightly clipped, intonation pattern that suggests Agent Smith’s distance from the emotions under discussion. Moreover, the gesture of removing his glasses reveals his lack of facial expression, emphasising his similarity to the impassive features of the two other agents. This parody of division is reflected in the false choice offered to Neo. He will not be allowed to refuse to help in the hunt for Morpheus. The interplay of key objects, dialogue and gesture in the interrogation scene connects visual and verbal forms of doubling to a parody of choice. While the non-choice presented in the scene is that of coercive cooperation – the agents secure Neo’s ‘help’ by violently inserting a bug in his navel – the linking of surveillance, entrapment and non-choice takes up aspects of Baudrillard’s analysis of capitalist consumption. Within the hyperreal the choice between a plethora of different goods is an illusion because any purchase simply serves to sustain the workings of the capitalist system. The consumers viewing themselves on the ‘“policing” television’ screen are thus twice trapped: caught within the screen-world that captures them in the act of non-choice that is capitalist consumption.41 Earlier in Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard uses the simile of a curved mirror to set up a link between capitalism, entrapment and the lack of differentiation between opposites. He argues that the implosion of the distinction between right and left renders the extreme ends of the political spectrum intersubsti­tutional. In this way, any political system is conjoined to its ‘extreme alternative like the two sides of a curved mirror, a vicious curvature of a political space that is henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from the right to the left, … the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface.’42 In the simile the folding over of capital marks the ­implosion of opposition, the movement literally obliterating the binary of exterior/interior. The figure reconstructs the mirror as a Möbius strip – silvered on each side and curving back over on itself – a key metaphor of absolute entrapment within the hyperreal.

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For Baudrillard, the hyperreal constitutes an inescapable space of enclosure because there can be no exit to a prior real. The implosion of opposites means that the hyperreal does away with both reality and fiction at the same time. This argument is set out in Baudrillard’s analysis of the changing role of science fiction, which combines the figure of the double with Alice Through the Looking Glass. He argues that it is no longer possible for science fiction to set up a series of fictional parallel universes because they are always already contained within the single, all-encompassing ‘universe of simulation’ that constitutes the hyperreal.43 Science fiction has always … played on the double … either artificial or imaginary, whereas here the double has disappeared, there is no longer a double, one is always already in the other world, which is no longer an other, without a mirror, a projection or a utopia that can reflect it – simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority – we will no longer even pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror’, that was still the golden age of transcendence.44

The mirror in Alice Through the Looking Glass provides access to a differential space, which Baudrillard constructs as a form of transcendence. The philosophical reading is underpinned by the imagery in Lewis Carroll’s story where Alice imagines that ‘the glass has got all soft like gauze’ in order for her and the kitten to pass through it.45 The simile reconstructs the hard surface of the mirror as a translucent material that acts as a partition between separate spaces, thus offering the possibility of passing through the veil to another world or life. Within the hyperreal, mirrors cease to act as dividing lines, becoming screens or Möbius strips that obliterate distinctions between the real and the fictional, interiority and exteriority, thus ensuring that there is no space beyond the universe of simulation. Critics have drawn parallels between the scene in which Neo is confronted by the liquid mirror in The Matrix and Alice’s journey through the looking glass. Gordon reads Neo’s journey as an inversion of Alice’s, arguing that the mirror in the film acts as a passageway to the real world on the other side of it.46 However, there are key differences between the book and the film. Alice’s mirror appears ‘to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist’, allowing

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her to access a differential space beyond it.47 In contrast, Neo does not travel through the mirror to a reality on the other side – he is transformed into a liquid looking glass. The scene also draws on the film’s previous presentations of computer screens. Having taken the red pill, Neo follows Morpheus into an adjoining room, sitting down beside a large, cracked, antique mirror and eventually turning to look directly into it. There is a cut to a POV shot of the mirror’s surface its cracks mending, conjoining his splintered reflection. This is followed by a medium shot of Neo turning towards Morpheus, Apoc and the others, asking incredulously ‘Did you …?’ Like the computer that sent unsolicited messages, the object of Neo’s gaze has become inexplicably animated, reversing the traditional subject/object relation. The liquid mirror takes on a life of its own, adhering to Neo’s fingertips when he tries to penetrate its surface and travelling over his hand. There is a cut to an extreme close-up of Neo’s silvered right hand, palm side up, on which two distorted reflections of his own face are clearly visible. This momentary redoubling is the last time that the liquid mirror acts as a reflective surface in the scene. The twin images reference Agent Smith’s glasses and the bank of television screens, forming a tactile and immediate variant of their modes of surveillance. The shimmering viscous substance travels up Neo’s arm and over his body while Apoc attempts to lock on to his location. There is a medium shot of Apoc, who is positioned between two computers, and the camera moves rapidly up and left, zooming in on the green screen, featuring circular patterns that appear to move towards a conical, spiral centre. This screen is shown moments later, Apoc shouting ‘lock’ as two series of broad green vertical lines conjoin in the middle, indicating the completion of the trace. The previous conical, spiral shapes are echoed as the liquid silvering disappears down Neo’s throat, curving back over on itself, followed by a fade to black. The film’s presentation of Neo’s transformation takes up key elements of Baudrillard’s figure of the mirror as a Möbius strip that folds over on itself. The silvering of Neo’s throat undoes the ­opposition between inside and outside, retaining the conceptual implication of the metaphor. Russell Kilbourn also notes the elision of opposites that characterises this moment, reading Neo’s

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merging with the mirror as an illustration of ‘the subject’s assimilation by Baudrillard’s simulacrum, effacing the distinction between the subject’s organic authenticity and its reflection’.48 The recon­ struction of Neo as simulacrum recalls previous moments of reversion in which he was presented as screen and terminal. However, Kilbourn argues that the reference to Baudrillard is negated by Neo’s rebirth in the vat, which is read as a return to the real.49 Importantly, readings of the vats as straightforwardly real fail to address the implications of using the figure of the liquid mirror as the means of transition between the two spaces. The undermining of the opposition between interiority/exteriority means that the world of the vats cannot be read as straightforwardly ‘outside’ the world of simulation that constitutes the matrix. Indeed it is only as a simulacrum, merged with the mirror’s silvering, that Neo can pass from one space to another. The parallels between the matrix and the realm of the vats are both verbal and visual. Neo’s vat has been read as a ‘uterine surrogate [that] recalls the primary meaning of “matrix” as “womb”’.50 Martin Danahay and David Rieder note the presence of high-rise, metallic, architectural structures in both places: ‘the power plant is reminiscent of a corporate building, all of its workers neatly stacked in cubicles, one floor on top of the next’.51 While the figure of the liquid mirror as Möbius strip clearly draws on Baudrillard’s metaphor, retaining its conceptual implications, the use of it to mark a moment of transition also constitutes a crucial departure from the source material. For Baudrillard, the hyperreal is a singular, undifferentiated space. While the transition to the vats is not presented as an escape to an ontologically different space, a real world, it does set up the possibility of differentiation within the hyperreal. The prefiguring of the moment of transition on Apoc’s screen suggests that the relation between the matrix and the vats is that of different levels in a computer game. It would seem that Merrin is wrong to assert that a blockbuster film could not convey the simulacrum’s obliteration of reality.52 He suggests that this would be too much for the film’s target audience, however, it is arguable that the average, youthful, videogame-literate spectator would find the presentation of a series of hyperreal worlds quite unproblematic. Indeed, such an audience might well be less

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wedded to the concept of an objective reality than a number of the film’s philosophical commentators! The majority of the critics who read the vats as the diegetic presentation of a real world: be it an exit from the hyperreal,53 or the end of Cartesian scepticism,54 fall into the trap of privileging Morpheus’ dialogue over the film’s images.55 The critics’ endeavour to find analogues for the written word that constitutes philosophy within the film multitrack results in the take up of dialogue as the closest approximation. In this way, the theoretical readings of The Matrix can be seen to reassert the binaries of word/image and conceptual/perceptual that were explored in chapter two. While these dichotomies are used to signify the differences between the two media, philosophy and film, their reappearance as underlying principles of film analysis results in their differentiating between elements of the filmic multitrack. Thus, the films’ dialogue conveys the vital, conceptual information, while the visual elements are not deemed worthy of analysis. This approach is summed up in Irwin’s introduction to his second edited collection. The articles are said to offer ‘the opportunity to linger over the words’ of the sequels, reducing philosophical film readings to commentaries on the dialogue.56 The use of dialogue as a surrogate for philosophy involves the editing out of elements that might undermine the representation of the speaker as the disembodied Word. Thus the quotation of great chunks of Morpheus’ speeches is rarely accompanied by an analysis of the visual context in which they are delivered, or Laurence Fishburne’s distinctive performance style. The result is a fundamental reworking of Morpheus’ role. Rather than being seen as one character among many, he becomes the voice of truth of The Matrix, his dialogue presented as pure philosophical exposition. The philosophical readings can therefore be seen to place characters that reflexively articulate their position centre stage. In this way, Morpheus becomes the new hero of The Matrix, displacing Neo whose inarticulate and intuitive grasp of the role of The One renders him inadequate.57 Interestingly, dialogue that would have explicitly mitigated against reading Morpheus as the voice of truth did not make the final cut of the film. All that remains is a brief reference in Cypher’s

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opening voice-over conversation about Neo. He exclaims exasperatedly to Trinity: ‘We’re going to kill him, you understand that?’ In the screenplay it is Cypher who highlights Morpheus’ fallibility, telling Neo he is the sixth contender for the role of The One and the previous five are dead. neo: What happened to them? cypher: Dead. All dead. neo: How? cypher: Honestly? Morpheus. He got them all amped up believing in bullshit. I watched each of them take on an Agent and I watched each of them die …58

Just before the visit to the Oracle, Neo taxes Morpheus who admits his previous misjudgements: ‘I believed that all I had to do was point my finger and anoint whoever [sic] I chose. I was wrong, Neo. Terribly wrong. Not a day or night passes that I do not think of them. After the fifth I lost my way. I doubted everything the Oracle had said. I doubted myself. And then I saw you, Neo and my world changed.’59 The elimination of these conversations from the first film means that Morpheus is not seen to be subject to doubts until the second. The sequels’ presentation of Morpheus as a zealot, whose hopes for The One are mistaken, means that he can no longer be misread as the voice of truth. Importantly, the complex interplay between words and images in the first film always constructed Morpheus as a profoundly ambiguous figure. He is named after the god of dreams, who is described in Ovid’s Metamorphosis as ‘a master at simulating humans, at counterfeiting men’.60 Morpheus is first presented on-screen standing with his back to camera in front of two ornately curtained French windows, through which flashes of lightning are clearly visible. As he turns there is a cut to a medium shot with a slight zoom in on his face and he utters the words ‘At last’ on viewing Neo. The mise-en-scène and the editing serve to give the character a ‘grandiloquent theatricality’ that foregrounds Fishburne’s authoritative performance.61 While Neo perches on the edge of one of the rust-coloured, antique leather, button-backed armchairs, Morpheus prowls around the other one, comparing Neo to ‘Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole’ and suggesting that he looks like a man who ‘is expecting to wake

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up.’ On sitting down, each lens of Morpheus’ mirror shades offers an indistinct reflection of Neo, recalling the twin images in Agent Smith’s sunglasses and suggesting untrustworthiness. Neo’s doubts are expressed by his immediate withdrawal into the depths of his armchair when Morpheus leans forward to offer him the two pills. The symmetry of their movements is displayed through a return to the balanced composition of the medium long shot, which features both characters in their respective armchairs either side of a central circular table. Morpheus says that the blue and red pills offer Neo the choice of waking up back in his own bed, or staying ‘in Wonderland’ and being shown ‘how deep the rabbit hole goes.’ The references to Alice in Wonderland are ambiguous because they are used in relation to two different modes of awakening within the same scene: outside the matrix or back in his own bed. This means that the rabbit hole is both within the matrix and its point of departure, the dialogue does not set up a clear distinction between the real and the fictional/dream worlds.62 The equation of the red pill and the truth is brought about by Morpheus’ final warning to Neo. The line ‘Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more’ is spoken at a brisk pace, emphasis falling on the words ‘all’ and ‘truth’. Adam Gopnik rightly comments that Fishburne delivers his lines ‘with a baritone aplomb worthy of Orson Welles.’63 The characteristic deep tones of his voice provide warmth and reassurance, balancing the brisk pace of delivery, and enabling Fishburne to infuse abstruse dialogue with a sense of deep conviction. The vocal performance clearly draws on a tradition of black Gospel preachers and this becomes clear in the sermon delivered to the people of Zion at the beginning of The Matrix Reloaded. However, the visual details undermine the truth claims presented by the dialogue. The visual presentation of the choice through an extreme close-up of Morpheus’ mirrored sunglasses, each lens sharply reflecting one hand with its proffered pill, clearly suggests that Neo chooses between two different hallucinogenic trips.64 Indeed, Ken Wilber makes this point in the DVD’s philosophical commentary, gleefully remarking: ‘Take both, I mean that’s what we do [sic] in the sixties, right?’ This reading is sustained by the hallucinogenic aspects of the mise-en-scènes of the matrix and the Nebuchadnezzar: ‘the cocaine chic of … 1980s corporate culture

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… versus the heroin chic of … 1990s grunge’.65 Joe Milutus argues that the two worlds are differentiated by distinctive colour palettes: the matrix where ‘the green and black of old-time computer screens imbue the image with what can only be called “raster-chic”’ and the ‘Calvin-Kleiny blue, grey, brown’ that infuses the images on Morpheus’ ship and later in Zion itself.66 Importantly, the dissonance between the different elements of the film multitrack, specifically dialogue versus images, does not mean that the film’s theoretical position is necessarily incoherent. The recognition that no one character functions as the voice of philosophy in The Matrix means that it is necessary to piece together visual, verbal and aural elements in order to construct the development of an overall theoretical position across the trilogy. The scene in which Neo is introduced to the ‘real world’, the machines’ enslavement and use of human beings as a source of energy, is marked by an extremely complex and self-reflexive use of dialogue and images. Dino Felluga rightly argues that the staging of this moment of revelation explicitly raises the issue of how it should be read. ‘The Wachowski brothers could just as easily have had Morpheus take Neo directly to the ruins of the world outside the ship. By presenting the “real” through the “Construct” they invite … questions … ’.67 The scene within the construct immediately recalls the matrix. Neo is shown within a completely white space and Morpheus appears in the distance behind him. The mobile fluid camera travels towards Morpheus, revolving around him to reveal two rust coloured, button-backed, leather armchairs with a central circular table, their sudden appearance reminiscent of a conjuring trick. These elements of the mise-en-scène are the same as those in Neo’s first meeting with Morpheus in the matrix, with the addition of a Radiola “Deep Focus” television on one side of the table. There is a cut to a long shot as Neo and Morpheus take up their positions beside the chairs they had occupied previously. The balanced symmetry of the shot composition is also the same as the two medium long shots taken during their discussion, however, the television completely obscures the central, circular table, replacing it as the key pivot point. The long shot is repeated after Morpheus says: ‘This is the world that you know’, picking up the remote from

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the table and gesturing towards the television. There is a cut to a medium shot of the screen displaying the Manhattan skyline and the camera zooms in, foregrounding the dark vertical bars visible on the screen. Morpheus changes the channels, the screen showing snow effects indicating a lack of signal between each transition, as he tells Neo that all the images are part of the ‘neural interactive simulation called the matrix’. The doubling of elements from the mise-en-scène of the matrix within the construct means that there is no ontological division between the images on the television screen and the realm in which Morpheus and Neo are sitting. Morpheus announces ‘This is the world as it exists today’ and there is a cut to a close-up of the snow effects on the television screen, which change to a blasted, blue-hued, urban scene reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic landscape in The Terminator.68 The screen glitches, a green, circular pattern at its centre, as the camera appears to move through it into the landscape. However the transition from the green tint to the blue is ­accompanied by the addition of electrical storm sound effects, providing an aural link to Neo’s and Morpheus’ meeting in the matrix. The camera work constructed through special effects begins with an apparent tilt down, revealing the granite-like grey rock beneath the city. This becomes a rapid, vertiginous flight down layers of strata, offering an aerial view of Morpheus and Neo with their armchairs and television repositioned amidst the rocks. The movement halts on Morpheus who, gesturing towards Neo with the remote control in his right hand, intones the line: ‘Welcome, to the desert, of the real’. Famously Morpheus’ line is the only quotation from Simulacra and Simulation to make the final cut of The Matrix. The line occurs in Baudrillard’s analysis of the fable of the Borges map discussed at the beginning of the chapter. The map is the perfect double of the territory of the Empire, which rots away as the Empire declines. Baudrillard uses the fable to demonstrate the precession of simulacra within the hyperreal: ‘the map … engenders the territory, and … today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.’69 The last line forms the basis of

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Morpheus’ welcome in the film, however, the screenplay contains a longer speech to Neo: ‘You have been living inside a dreamworld, Neo. As in Baudrillard’s vision, your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory. This is the world as it exists today … The desert of the real’.70 Kilbourn comments that the decision to cut parts of the speech was good because it sets up oppositional relations between map/territory, dream/real, which Baudrillard eradicates.71 However, Kilbourn argues that other elements of Morpheus’ dialogue set up the opposition between dreams/reality, thereby offering a positively unBaudrillardian ‘one-way trip out of the simulacrum’.72 Kilbourn’s reading of The Matrix briefly draws on a model of adaptation as ‘the carnalization of … transcendental signification’ – the Word converted into inferior, material flesh.73 ‘In the film, Baudrillard’s “desert of the real”, as literal absence of the real, is literalized as the presence of the real-as-desert: the sky has been “scorched”, and Morpheus’ ship … moves through the Wilderness of the sewersystem far underground.’74 The movement from absence to presence in the quotation sustains two shifts: the transition from the written word to the film’s materiality, and the hyperreal’s lack of reality to the film’s assertion of a real. Although the philosophical word is to be understood literally in this case, the process of literalisation that is adaptation still results in its distortion, reversing the conceptual implications of Baudrillard’s metaphor. The view of adaptation as a form of concretisation that is necessarily literal also informs Baudrillard’s interview, which is prefaced with the quotation: ‘The simulacrum hypothesis deserved better than to become a reality.’75 The quote suggests that the process of transferring a verbal hypothesis onto film constitutes a form of realisation that destroys the hypothetical nature of the argument, linking the change of medium to the alleged distortion of the philosopher’s ideas discussed in chapter one. Kilbourn’s analysis of The Matrix as literal and necessarily distortive is both unexpected, given his attention to textual detail, and unfair. The sophistication of the visual and aural elements in the scene clearly suggests that this ‘reality’ is another hyperreal world. Its presentation as yet another programme on the Radiola tele­ vision parallels it with those offered by the matrix. Importantly,

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the transition through the screen acts as a repeated motif, first used prior to Neo’s interrogation by the agents. Both scenes present the screen as a space of entrapment. In this case the dark, vertical bars on the screen are mirrored by the vertical lines of blasted, highrise structures, collapsing the division between the screen and the image on the other side. The movement towards an urban landscape that is a copy of The Terminator, accompanied by the storm sound effects utilised in the matrix, also emphasise its status as hyperreal. The dizzying fluidity and speed of the special-effects camera work underscores its presentation of a geographically impossible space. As a result, the gesture that accompanies Morpheus’ speech of welcome – the flourish of the remote control – is more telling than he knows. He welcomes Neo to a real world presented by/as a screen, constructed in an imitation of a filmic model, and visually rendered through showcasing new developments in digital effects: the hyperfilmic is indeed the desert of the real. In the dialogue that follows, Morpheus’ story takes the form of a familiar morality tale. The post-apocalyptic realm of 2199 is the consequence of humanity’s overweening pride: ‘we marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to, A I.’ While he does not know how the battle between humanity and the machines began, Morpheus asserts: ‘but we know it was us who scorched the skies’. The use of the pronoun ‘we’ suggests that this story belongs to a wider, oral tradition, while the alliterative presentation of the metaphor draws attention to both rhetorical devices, suggesting that it has be retold many times. The attempt to defeat the machines by depriving them of solar power instantly rebounds upon the humans – erasing the sun clearly functioning as yet another instance of the sin of pride. Human dependence upon machines will now be inverted, as the machines become dependent upon humans for energy in the story that unfolds. Morpheus draws attention to the overall balance of the story’s structure in advance, commenting: ‘fate, it would seem, is not without a sense of irony.’ The rhetorical aspects of the dialogue, coupled with the reflexive references to rhetoric, serve to foreground the process of story telling, constructing Morpheus as a narrator rather than the voice of truth. The reflexive rendition of the story of 2199 highlights its status as a fictional construct and this is compounded by its visual

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p­ resentation. Morpheus looks upwards as he delivers his line about fate’s ‘sense of irony’ and his mirrored glasses reflect the continuous play of light and dark in the thunderous clouds above him.76 There is a cut to a long shot of the skies, the editing suggesting that it can be read as Morpheus’ point-of-view. However, the thunderous skies become a screen for displaying the story, thus reflecting the twin screens of the mirrored glasses. The long shot shows a transi­tion between two different colour palettes: the lime-whites, blues and metallic greys of the scorched skies changing to sunset oranges, pinks and reds. The change of colour is accompanied by the addition of a faint horizontal line at the centre of the central cloud formation, which has the effect of dividing the image in on itself, as if it were a sunset over still water. Like Baudrillard’s television screens the skies play out ‘a game of splitting’ in anticipation of a further transition that also ‘closes this world on itself.’77 The horizon line is astonishingly reconfigured as the edge of the closed eyelid of an unseeing foetus, the sunset colours becoming the pink/red tones of developing human tissue. The dissolves from the horizon, which provides the cloudscape with a clear vanishing point by setting up lines of sight, to the sightless eye, construct a new visual metaphor for entrapment. This is created through the welding of opposites, thus drawing on and augmenting Baudrillard’s characterisation of the hyperreal. The play on seeing and not seeing is continued through the interweaving of dialogue and images. The special effects provide the impression of the camera pulling out from the unseeing eye of the foetus, giving a view of the foetus in its pod and finally displaying row upon row of pods. The fields of pods resemble those found on the spacecraft in Alien,78 but the architectural steel structures emphasise the machinic in contrast to the organic life forms found on the craft.79 Morpheus provides the voice over commentary, saying: ‘For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it. And then I saw the fields with my own eyes.’ Carolyn Korsmeyer points out, Morpheus’ appeal to the proverbial wisdom of ‘seeing’s [sic] believing’ does not work because the saying ends: ‘but touching’s [sic] the truth’.80 The equation of knowledge and sight in his line is hugely problematic given that it is prefaced by a figurative, visual transition that plays out the shutting down of lines of sight. Moreover, Morpheus’ words

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are immediately followed by the image of a metal door, shaped like an old-fashioned camera aperture, revolving shut, thus forming another closed eye. Silvery, shiny, viscous liquid, resembling Neo’s liquid mirror, flows forward over and around tangles of metallic, black tubing that are attached to a sleeping baby. The liquid mirror is now presented within the world of the vats, creating another link to the matrix. The movement through the aperture/door, past the baby, and back out through the television screen is digitally rendered as a single, seamless shot. The ‘shot’ links the old fashioned camera and the 1950s Radiola television, referencing ‘the days before the line [between representation and the real] had blurred’81 while selfreflexively playing out its dissolution through the fluid linking of a series of topographically impossible, hyperreal spaces. The readings of the realm of the vats as the world as it really is in 2199 fail to address the figurative implications of the filmic multitrack. Moreover, the suggestion that a filmic presentation of the hyperreal would automatically literalise the philosophical Word really does not begin to do justice to the high levels of ­figuration that characterise this presentation of at least two constructs within the construct. The transitions between the different spaces are clearly non-realist and conceptually complex. Moreover, the sophisticated presentation of transitional modes and moments is a feature of the trilogy as a whole. The valorisation of dialogue over all the other elements of the filmic multitrack is at the heart of the realist readings. Merrin’s first article makes the desire for a hero that tells the truth very clear: ‘not once does Neo consider whether this “real world” he is shown might not be just another level of virtual reality’.82 The response can only be that the complex filmic figures convey and construct this possibility from the beginning, creating a discrepancy between what the characters know and what the ­audience understands. A few theorists have argued that The Matrix sets up a series of hyperreal worlds.83 Peter B. Lloyd reads the ‘real’ world as a ‘metamatrix’, which acts as a forum for the battle between the humans and the machines.84 For Lloyd, ‘the characters perpetually “wake up” from one matrix only to find themselves in another’ and he contends that this is consistent with Baudrillard’s conception of the hyperreal.85 In contrast, Vartan Messier argues that the film’s

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p­ resentation of a meta-matrix is a significant alteration of the philosophical source material: ‘the sociologist’s conceptualization of the hyperreal does not provide for the possibility of multiple, simultaneous matrices.’86 This perspective is more convincing in that Baudrillard asserts that the hyperreal lacks any forms of differentiation – it is a singular, flat, ‘universe of simulation’.87 Importantly, both Lloyd and Messier utilise the criterion of fidelity to the philosophical source, presenting the film as a good/bad copy respectively. Thus for Messier, the films’ divergence from their source is simply dismissed as a distortion of Baudrillard’s work and he supplements this argument by drawing on material from the interview. In contrast, I want to argue that the presentation of a series of differentiated hyperreal spaces in The Matrix marks the starting point of the construction of the trilogy’s distinctive philosophical position. The key transitions: Neo’s merging with the mirror, the movement through screens, the horizon/eyelid and closing ­aperture/iris, all serve to set up different levels within the hyperreal. In the film, the liquid mirror is a moment of metamorphosis, transforming Neo into a simulacrum. At a meta-critical level, the filmic metaphor draws on Baudrillard’s figure of the mirror as Möbius strip, reconfiguring it as a moment of transition between two hyperreal spaces. The change of figuration alters its conceptual implications, thus exemplifying the way in which adaptation can constitute a form of metamorphosis that creates a new philosophical position. At the same time, the introduction of differentiation within the hyperreal draws attention to Baudrillard’s reliance on binary opposition and duality, seen in the figures of the double, the mirror image and the dream, and the repeated erasure of the two in the construction of the one, singular hyperreal. In presenting a series of differentiated hyperreal realms, The Matrix challenges Baudrillard’s argument that the erasure of duality must result in singularity. The format of the trilogy privileges triples and the distinctive colour palettes set out in the first film are used to delineate the three main hyperreal worlds: the green of the matrix, the blue/browns of Zion and the oranges/reds of machine city. The last colour palette is first presented in the transition from the sunset skies to the foetal eyelid and its take up to delineate the fires of machine city is interesting because the relation to human skin is

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displaced. Within the trilogy the fate of the coppertops is not the key issue. Deprived of their status as ‘the real’ they constitute the form of the human avatar in the machine world. The coppertops are subsumed as part of a broader question, the possible forms of inter-relation between the three main worlds. The trilogy draws on Baudrillard’s writing on the code to consider whether there can be modes of relationality other than the agonistic duality of ­opposition or assimilation into the one.

Notes 1 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 1, 11, 25, 51, 76, 95, 105, 125, 143, 147–8. 2 Ibid., pp. 1, 11. 3 Ibid., p. 1. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. The paragraph ends with the line: ‘The desert of the real itself’, which Morpheus reworks as ‘Welcome, to the desert, of the real’. This will be addressed in detail later in the chapter. 6 Ibid., p. 11. 7 J. Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Beitchman (Columbia University, New York: Semiotext(e) Inc., 1983) p. 23. I have used this translation for this quote because it uses the figure of the double. Shelia Faria Glaser’s translation refers to the process of doubling, see Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 11. 8 Baudrillard does not indicate which version of The Student of Prague he is refer­ encing. However, Graeme Gilloch argues that it is most likely to be Hemrik Galeen’s version, which was made in 1926. G. Gilloch, ‘Double Negative: The Student of Prague in Baudrillard, Kracauer and Kittler’, conference paper delivered at the ‘Engaging Baudrillard’ Conference, Swansea University, 5/9/06. 9 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 148, fn. 1. 10 This version of subject/object relations is set out earlier in the volume. Ibid., p. 95. 11 Ibid., p. 148, fn. 1. 12 H. C. Andersen, ‘The Shadow’, in The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, ed. and trans. D. Crone Frank and J. Frank (London: Granta Books, 2005), pp. 206–19, pp.  218–19. 13 Andersen, The Shadow, p. 214. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 215. 16 Ibid., p. 216. 17 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 147–8, fn. 1. 18 Ibid, p. 148, fn. 1. 19 Ibid. My italics. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

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Mirrors and Screens  93 22 23 24 25 26 27



28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 145. Ibid. Ibid. Plato, The Republic, ed. and trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1987), p. 426. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 95. My italics. For an interesting discussion of the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy does and does not conform to Baudrillard’s model of cinema see W. Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 122–5. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.46. Ibid., pp. 45–6. Ibid., p. 48. E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 32. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 95. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid. R. Hanley, ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, essay added to the official website on 19/12/03. http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com (accessed 3/3/04). See, for example, the discussion of the four phases of the image. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 6. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 51. Ibid. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (London and New York: Puffin Books, 1997), p. 158. A. Gordon, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur, part two’, in G. Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2003), p. 112. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, p.  158. Russell J. A. Kilbourn, ‘Re-writing “Reality”: reading The Matrix’, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 9:2 (2000), p. 48. Ibid. Ibid., p. 49. While Danahay and Rieder parallel the two realms, they offer a Marxist reading of The Matrix in which the coppertops are seen to constitute the film’s economic ‘reality’. M. A. Danahay and D. Rieder, ‘The Matrix, Marx, and the coppertop’s life’, in W. Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), p. 219.

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94  Adapting philosophy 52 Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, p. 121. 53 Gordon, ‘The Matrix’, pp. 111–12; Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, pp. 119–20, 126; S. Lutzka, ‘Simulacra, simulation and The Matrix’, in M. Diocaretz and S. Herbrechter (eds), The Matrix in Theory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp.  120–1. 54 Chris Falzon’s comparative readings of The Matrix and Total Recall are dialogue driven. The latter is said to be better because the dialogue consistently blurs the opposition of dream/real. C. Falzon, ‘Philosophy and The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds), The Matrix in Theory, pp. 100–3. M. Litch, Philosophy Through Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 18. 55 Even Kilbourn, who pays an unusual amount of attention to the visual details in the film, ends up privileging dialogue. See ‘Re-writing “reality”: reading The Matrix’, p.  50. 56 W. Irwin, ‘Coming Attractions: “Where have you gone, Mr. Anderson?”’, in More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2005), pp. xi–xiii, p. xi. 57 It is to be noted that recent philosophical writing has privileged Agent Smith, another character who makes long speeches! See J. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy and the future of religion’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2:2 (2005). Online journal; and S. Herbrechter, ‘The posthuman subject in The Matrix’, in Diocaretz and Herbrechter (eds), The Matrix in Theory, pp. 263, 273, 280. 58 L. and A. Wachowski, ‘The Matrix screenplay’, in S. Lamm (ed.) The Art of The Matrix (London: Titan Books and WB Publishing, 2000), p. 330. 59 Ibid., pp. 338–9. 60 This is Felluga’s gloss of Ovid in ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur, part one’, in Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, p. 93. 61 A. Gopnik, ‘The unreal thing’, The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/critics/ atlarge/?030519crat_atlarge. Accessed on 12/12/03. 62 Contrary to Gordon’s argument, ‘The Matrix: paradigm of postmodernism or intellectual poseur, part two’, p. 112. 63 Gopnik, ‘The unreal thing’. 64 These reflections were added digitally in postproduction. Lamm (ed.) The Art of The Matrix, p. 62. 65 C. Constable, ‘Baudrillard reloaded: inter-relating philosophy and film via The Matrix Trilogy’, Screen, 47:2 (2006), p. 240. 66 J. Milutus, ‘Making the world safe for fashionable philosophy!’, www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=390. Accessed 12/03/07. 67 Felluga, ‘The Matrix, p. 93. 68 J. Cameron, The Terminator, 1984. 69 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 1. 70 L. and A. Wachowski, ‘The Matrix screenplay’, p. 310. 71 Kilbourn, ‘Re-writing “reality”: reading The Matrix’, p. 54, fn. 16. Sven Lutzka makes the same point in his analysis of the film, ‘Simulacra, simulation and The Matrix’, p.  121.

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Mirrors and Screens  95 72 Kilbourn, ‘Re-writing “reality”: reading The Matrix’, p. 50. 73 K. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 167. 74 Kilbourn, ‘Re-writing “reality”: reading The Matrix’, p. 50. My italics. 75 J. Baudrillard, ‘The Matrix decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Jean Baudrillard’, trans G. Genosko and A. Bryx, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1:2 (2004). Online journal accessed 23/3/07. Quotation from J. Baudrillard, Cool Memories IV (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 92. 76 The importance of the glasses in this shot can be seen in the storyboards for the scene. Lamm (ed.) The Art of The Matrix, p. 92. 77 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 76. 78 R. Scott, Alien, 1979. 79 For a reading of the organic aspects of the alien craft see C. Constable, ‘Becoming the monster’s mother: morphologies of identity in the Alien series’, in A. Kuhn (ed.) Alien Zone II (New York and London: Verso, 1999), pp. 176–7. 80 Korsmeyer offers a very interesting analysis of Morpheus’ contradictory use of visual metaphors for knowledge while simultaneously advising Neo against believing what he sees. C. Korsmeyer, ‘Seeing, believing, touching, truth’, in Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy, pp. 46–7. 81 The original quote refers only to the television. D. Weberman, ‘The Matrix: simulation and the postmodern age’ in Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy, pp. 225–39, p. 231. 82 W. Merrin, ‘Did you ever eat tasty wheat? Baudrillard and The Matrix’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, www.Nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/articlesdidyou-ever-eat.htm, downloaded 12/3/07. 83 S. Herbrechter, ‘The posthuman subject in The Matrix’, pp. 262–3; P. Vigo and V. Murray, ‘The Matrix exploded’, Metro, 138 (2003), pp. 168–9. 84 P. B. Lloyd’s argument as glossed by V. Messier, ‘Baudrillard in The Matrix: the hyperreal, Hollywood and a case for misused references’, www.thefilmjournal. com/issue13/thematrix.html, accessed on 12/3/07. 85 Ibid. 86 Messier, ‘Baudrillard in The Matrix’, www.thefilmjournal.com/issue13/thematrix. html, accessed on 12/3/07. 87 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 125.

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4

Codes

T

his chapter will explore the ways in which the trilogy takes up and alters Baudrillard’s concept of the genetic/digital code.1 Within Simulacra and Simulation the code functions as a point of intersection for a number of Baudrillard’s ideas and arguments. This chapter will address three key aspects of its presentation. Firstly, the code functions as a monistic single substance underpinning the singular universe of simulation. Secondly, the code marks the end of the process of doubling and the beginning of duplication – a move into serial replication that destroys the notion of unique individuality. Finally, Baudrillard links his analyses of television and cloning to present the code as an inexorable, deterministic mode of technical/biological pre-programming. The trilogy draws on all three aspects of the characterisation of the code, metamorphosing each in the development of a different philosophical position. The first reference to the code in Simulacra and Simulations occurs during a discussion of an early foray into ‘reality TV’, the American televisation of the Loud family in 1971. This involved ‘seven months of uninterrupted shooting, three hundred hours of non-stop broadcasting, without a script or a screenplay’.2 For Baudrillard, the dynamics of representation rely on a series of absolute divisions between reality and its representational copies, and subject/object. The transition to the digital code of the programmed signal erases these divisions in that the gulf between the subject and its image disappears. The Louds’ relation to their televised images is said to be both immanent and instantaneous, resembling the relation between ‘a living substance’ and ‘its molecular code.’3 The transition is also said to erase other key distinctions, including sender/

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receiver and medium/message – all such differentials are rendered equivalent in that they are seen to be expressions of the one code.4 ‘A single model, whose efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the real.’5 In this way, the code operates as a form of monism, it is the one substance that underpins a number of different modalities and, as a result, all the different modalities are rendered fundamentally the same. Baudrillard’s conception of the code incorporates aspects of the genetic and the digital, which will be discussed throughout the chapter. The use of both models in the characterisation of the code enables Baudrillard to present it as foundational and utterly artificial.6 Baudrillard’s characterisation of the code as a monistic single substance has clear resonances within The Matrix Trilogy. The first film takes up the references to the digital code in its presentation of the matrix. The matrix takes the visual form of multiple, luminous, green lines of digits, which travel vertically down the screens monitored by Tank, Cypher and others. After his death and resurrection at the end of the first film, Neo is able to view the structures of the matrix directly. He looks down the corridor towards the three agents who are gathered in the lift, having just confidently pronounced him dead. This is followed by a POV shot in which the silhouettes of the agents and the lift space are picked out in green, while the rest is filled in with luminous lines of code that travel vertically up and down the screen. The slight discrepancy between Neo’s view, in which the codes travel in both directions, and those presented on the monitors suggests that the foundational structure itself can be mapped differently, thus changing Baudrillard’s emphasis on the singular nature of the code. The Matrix Reloaded offers a key shift in the trilogy’s take up of the code in that it presents two different underlying codes. Neo’s visit to the Oracle is prefaced by an encounter with Seraph, who is first seen in long shot sitting on a low wooden stool drinking tea. Seraph ignores Neo’s greeting, and there is a cut to close-up of Neo eyeing him intently followed by another long shot of the room. The POV shot shows the underlying structures of the furnishings, the outline of the long tables is traced in now familiar lines of green digits that move across the different planes. In contrast, Seraph’s outline is picked out in white light, a visual reference to his angelic

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status, while his body is made up of sparkling, circular, sequin-like points of red/orange light. The presentation of two contrasting foundational structures make it clear that Seraph is constructed from a different form of code. Both he and the Oracle are identified as programmes from the machine city in the following scene. The machine code is presented on three occasions during the second film. The second occurs when the machines are discovered to be drilling down to Zion. One of the operators at Zion Head­ quarters informs Link that the machines have hit some iron ore, which will slow them up for an hour. The subsequent aerial shot of the drill presents it as a kaleidoscope of ever-changing, centrally orientated patterns, featuring circular points of orange/red light. The beauty of the fundamental pattern appears to be at odds with the drill’s entirely destructive purpose. The theme of destruction is picked up in the final, ambiguous presentation of the code, a brief long shot of the building that houses the source being blown up. The explosion is first presented by circles of orange/red light that emerge through the green mirrored façade of the building, cracking the surface and eventually exploding outwards. The explosion links the colour of the circular patterns to fire, a symbolism that is expanded at the end of the third film. Neo arrives at machine city having been blinded in the fight with Bane/Agent Smith. His blindness enables him to ‘see’ the heart of the machine city as flurries of light. On exiting the Logos, there is a long shot of Neo walking along the dark, metallic structures of machine city. He looks downwards and there is a cut to a POV shot, showing his legs and feet as dark shadows surrounded by rippling pools of bright light, which shine against a grid-like pattern of luminous orange/yellow lines. The lines of the grid travel vertically downwards and horizontally across the screen, the first clearly recalling the movement of the matrix code. Moreover, the resemblance suggests that The One maps foundational structures in a similar way. The second POV shot shows Neo’s view of the skyline of machine city, in which the dark silhouettes of the buildings are retained but filled in with undulating patterns of red/orange/ yellow light that billow upwards like flames. The flurries of heat recall the fire of the explosion and constitute an appropriate form for a foundational structure given that fire is one of the four primary

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elements. Indeed, the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, argued that fire was the underlying primary substance of the universe because of its capacity for continual change. Interestingly, the film’s presentation of the machine code gives it the paradoxical capacity of Heraclitan fire, constituting both the basis of civilisation and the means of its destruction. While Baudrillard’s characterisation of the code draws on the different forms of the digital and genetic codes, he is concerned to unify the two into a single substrate. In the same way as the hyperreal, the code constitutes its own singular universe whose form eradicates all binary opposition. The trilogy’s alterations to the concept of the code initially follow the same pattern as their transformation of the hyperreal. The films multiply both structures offering a series of (at least) three main hyperreal worlds and two different codes. Furthermore, the use of fire as a key visual reference for one of the codes has the effect of reintroducing binary opposition into a model that explicitly abolishes it. For Heraclitus, fire is both indispensable to the process of creation, exemplified in the ironwork of the blacksmith, while also being a means of destruction.7 The visual presentation of the code underlying machine city thus reinforces Counsellor West’s discussion with Neo in which the former draws attention to the paradoxical role of the machines, noting that they are both indispensable for human survival and the means of humanity’s destruction. The divergent capacities of the machine code suggests that it could be played out in profoundly different ways and I will return to this point in the next chapter. While the trilogy clearly takes up and alters the code in its presentation of two models of underlying structures, the films also take up the concept of serial duplication that Baudrillard develops in relation to the code. The transformation of the complex figure of the double into the duplicate is set out at the beginning of Baudrillard’s discussion of cloning. The change marks the end of the double as phantom, shadow, mirror image and dream, it becomes an ‘exact replica’.8 Everyone can dream, and must have dreamed his whole life, of a perfect duplication or multiplication of his being, but such copies only have the power of dreams and are destroyed when one attempts to force the dream into the real. … It belonged to our era to wish to exorcise this

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100  Adapting philosophy phantom … to … materialize it in flesh and bone and … to change the game of the double from a subtle exchange of death with the Other into the eternity of the Same.9

The physical materialisation of the phantom in the form of a perfect copy, the clone, marks the end of key divisions between substantial real/insubstantial spectral and self/other. Unlike the folkloric double whose appearance means imminent death, the clone represents the possibility of prolonging life indefinitely, thus nullifying the distinction between life and death. While the remainder acts as a figure of reversibility rendering the oppositional elements of life/death intersubstitutional,10 cloning completely eradicates oppositional difference thereby establishing an ‘eternity of the Same.’11 Cloning eradicates differentiation in two key ways. Firstly, the product is a precise replica that forms part of a potentially infinite series: ‘cloning enshrines the reiteration of the same: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, etc.’.12 The endless proliferation of perfect copies is paralleled with the proliferation of mechanical reproductions of works of art, which result in the destruction of the very concept of the original.13 In the case of the serial replication of clones what is destroyed is the concept of the unique individual – a key element of humanist values.14 The second erasure of differentiation is brought about by the clone’s precursors. For Baudrillard, clones can be created from a single cell, thus obliterating the duality required for sexual reproduction and therefore the distinction between male and female. Clones. Cloning. Human cuttings ad infinitum, each individual cell of an organism capable of again becoming the matrix of an identical individual. In the United States, a child was born a few months ago like a geranium: from cuttings … The first born from a single cell of a single individual, his ‘father,’ the sole progenitor, of which he would be the exact replica …15.

Baudrillard’s simile presents the eradication of sexual difference as the erasure of the human: the child resembles a garden plant grown from cuttings. Later metaphors parallel the clone with its cellular precursor. In an inversion of Darwinian models of evolution, cloning enables ‘complex beings to achieve the destiny of protozoas.’16

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Non-human, cellular replication eradicates both biological reproduction and its concomitant theoretical models. ‘Cellular dream of scissiparity, the purest form of parentage, because it finally allows one to do without the other, to go from the same to the same’.17 The code thus supersedes Freud’s Oedipal model in which parental figures play key roles in the construction of sexual difference and the consequent development of sexuality: the father constituting the voice of prohibition and the mother as the (ultimately forbidden) object of desire.18 For Baudrillard, ‘Father and Mother have disappeared … in the service of a matrix called code. No more mother, no more father: a matrix. And it is the matrix, that of the genetic code that now infinitely “gives birth” based on a functional mode purged of all aleatory sexuality.’19 The shift from biological reproduction to serial replication thus constitutes a move away from the precarious and chancy nature of human couplings, providing a new model of functional consistency. The use of the code to eliminate chance will be discussed later in the chapter. Baudrillard’s characterisation of the code also draws on the pathology of two different diseases: viruses and cancer. The earlier discussion of ‘reality television’ stresses its role in the hyperreal ‘dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV’.20 The lack of boundaries between real/fictional and spectator/spectacle means that the television has an instantaneous, immediate effect on its audience, which is described as ‘a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium’.21 The comparison is immediately challenged: ‘But one must watch out for the negative turn that discourse imposes: it is a question neither of disease nor a viral infection’.22 However, Baudrillard’s later characterisation of the genetic code involves comparing the cellular replication required to produce clones with the proliferation of cancer cells. ‘All the individuals produced through cloning individual X, are they anything other than a cancerous metastasis – the proliferation of the same cells such as occurs with cancer?’23 The retention of the negative metaphor of disease is unsurprising given that ­Baudrillard typically utilises metaphors that retain the negative aspects of binary opposition. For example, the hyperreal dissolves the opposition of life/death, yet it is continually characterised as a haunted, deathly space.

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Baudrillard offers an extended comparison of the code and cancer, arguing that both are ultimately reliant on single cellular elements that are multiplied through a process of perfect ­replication. There is a narrow relation between the key concept of the genetic code and the pathology of cancer: the code designates the smallest simple element, the minimal formula to which an entire individual can be reduced, and in such a way that he can only reproduce himself identically to himself. Cancer designates a proliferation ad infinitum of a base cell without taking into consideration the organic laws of the whole.24

In the case of cancer, cellular replication involves disregarding the totality of the human host, in that it ultimately causes them to die. In the same way, cloning cannot be contained or prevented by an appeal to the laws of nature or society: ‘nothing opposes itself any longer to the renewal of the Same, to the unchecked proliferation of a single matrix.’25 For Baudrillard, cancer is not one illness among many, but rather ‘the illness that controls all contemporary pathology, because it is the very form of the virulence of the code’.26 Agent Smith’s interrogation of Morpheus at the end of the first film takes up a number of Baudrillard’s metaphors of disease. Musing on the classification of the human species, Agent Smith argues that they are not mammals because ‘every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equivalence with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you mul-tip-ly and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area.’ The stretching out of each syllable of the first ‘multiply’ and its subsequent repetition emphasises the inexorability of the process, taking up Baudrillard’s analysis of the unstoppable proliferation characteristic of cloning and cancer. However, the word also recalls God’s commandment: ‘Go forth and multiply’, giving an additional biblical resonance. Human multiplication, like cancer, is characterised by a disregard for the whole, only this time the threatened host is the planet. Agent Smith continues: ‘There is another organism … that follows the same pattern … A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.’ While Agent Smith’s dialogue retains a number of the key elements of Baudrillard’s analysis of cloning and cancer, it should be noted

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that the philosopher’s conception of the individual as ‘a cancerous metastasis of its base formula’ also emphasises the fundamental element, the single cell from which all the copies are made.27 This emphasis on singularity is absent from the trilogy, which focuses on multiplication or multiples, seen previously in the presentation of a plurality of hyperreal worlds. The final comparison of human beings to the plague adds a further twist to the earlier biblical reference. Obedience to divine command has had the contrary effect of producing a planetary scourge – plagues are traditionally used by God to punish those who are disobedient. Importantly, the references to viruses and cancer are used to de-humanise humanity, thus drawing on Baudrillard’s metaphors and his overall argument. The viral comparison also operates as a general reference to computing. Overall, Agent Smith’s dialogue strongly suggests that the human beings presented in The Matrix have the status of digital code. Indeed, the second film reveals all the inhabitants of the different hyperreal worlds, the matrix and Zion, to be a series of computer programmes. Agent Smith’s final words to Morpheus in the short scene are: ‘You are a plague. And we are the cure.’ The dialogue sets up an opposition between the human as disease and the agents as corrective cure. This would appear to be contrary to Baudrillard’s characterisation of the code and its intimate relation to its most virulent form: cancer. For Baudrillard, the digital/genetic code operates as a single model in which all opposition is always already contained and therefore abolished. Cancer would therefore be a specific and virulent modality of the single code. However, he does offer an entirely different analysis of cancer in a lengthy endnote: ‘cancerous proliferation is also a silent disobedience of the injunctions of the genetic code. Cancer, if it fits with the logic of a nuclear/computer science vision of human beings, is also its monstrous excrescence and negation, because it leads to total disinformation and to disaggregation.’28 Thus in Simulacra and Simulation cancer is both the epitome of the code and its radical negation. A similar ambivalence can be seen in the references to cancer within The Matrix. While human beings display the code’s charac­­ teristic proliferation through replication, their construction as a dis­­ ease also suggests they constitute a form of systemic ­malfunction.

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Agent Smith is first presented as a custodian of the system, his very name epitomising the lack of individuality proper to the guardians of the matrix. However, Neo’s inadvertent regeneration of him in their final battle of the first film results in his reformulation. Once unplugged, or overwritten, Agent Smith becomes the virus/ cancer/plague that he had previously denounced. His new role takes up and distorts a key modality of the code, serial replication, exaggerating it to the point of nihilistic negation. While Baudrillard argues that serial replication supersedes human reproduction and humanist values, Agent Smith transforms it into a means of eradicating humanity and all the human remnants of emotion and illogicality that remain within the hyperreal worlds of the matrix and Zion. The first presentations of Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded play out the transition from the double as shadow to the duplicate. Agent Smith is first shown in silhouette, the bright backlighting completely shadowing his face, rendering him unrecognisable apart from the distinctive voice. He hands over a package containing his redundant earpiece to be passed on to Neo. The use of the shadow double suggests that Agent Smith can be regarded as Neo’s negation. However, the comments that accompany the transaction: ‘I have something for him. A gift. You see, he set me free’, parallels Agent Smith’s transformation with Neo’s progress as The One.29 Neo’s development is immediately demonstrated by his swift dispatch of three upgraded agents. Agent Smith enters the battle scene once it is over. His entrance is shown in a close-up of a pair of highly polished, black, lace-up shoes crunching over the broken glass of a streetlamp. The camera tracks left, keeping the shoes in frame and there is a cut to a close-up of an identical pair of shoes, moving in the opposite direction as the camera tracks right. The mirroring pattern of the shots is broken by a cut to a medium shot of Agent Smith, who can be regarded as #1 or #2 given that he is the first to speak but the second on the scene. He comments: ‘It’s happening exactly as before’, and the camera pans right to reveal his duplicate who replies ‘Well, not exactly!’ The reply sets up a potential dissonance between the visual presentation of duplication and a temporal process of repetition, which will be addressed later.

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The visual presentation of the process of replication that creates innumerable Agent Smiths takes up the symbolism of disease from his speech in the first film. The first transformation occurs in a short scene that begins with the successful escape of one of the rebels down a telephone line. His transfer back to safety is presented as a transformation into white light, setting up a key contrast with Bane’s metamorphosis into Smith, which is presented as a process of becoming darkness. There is a medium shot of Bane as Smith’s hand penetrates the area around his heart, black strands snaking up and down his body. He gasps: ‘Oh God’, and there is a cut to a medium close-up of his attacker who sardonically replies: ‘Smith will suffice!’ The shiny, tactile, black substance resembles pitch, constructing Agent Smith’s touch as a form of defilement. The rapidly multiplying and thickening strands visually play out the process of proliferation characteristic of the spread of the human virus/cancer/plague. The biblical and biological aspects combine with the technological context, strongly suggesting that the proliferation of Agent Smiths constitutes a form of viral contamination.30 The next shot shows the black strands multiplying beneath Bane’s glasses, and the camera zooms in as the darkness covers his face. The close-up plays out the destruction of individuality through the process of serial duplication. The film’s presentation of serial replication is clearly negative in that it utilises the metaphors of disease, adding the biblical imagery of darkness and contamination. The film thus parallels Baudrillard’s strategy of retaining negative metaphors to characterise cloning and the code. Rereading Simulacra and Simulation in the light of The Matrix Trilogy, I noted Baudrillard’s use of twins as an interim figure, marking the end of the double as dream and the rise of the clone. The clone is initially described as an ‘exact replica, the perfect twin, the double.31 While cloning is presented as a scientific innovation, the reference to twins enables Baudrillard to provide an ancient precursor for the materialisation of the double – the constellation Gemini.32 This means that the ostensibly new scientific model is also subject to the precession of simulacra discussed in the previous chapter. Baudrillard goes on to differentiate between the model of iterability presented by cloning, ‘1 + 1 + 1 + 1’, and the ‘particular and sacred fascination of the Two’ possessed by twins.33 However, he

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continues to use twins as exemplary of the precession of the model, in that they epitomise the sense of being always already doubled that is characteristic of the hyperreal.34 The later discussion of the hologram repositions the twins alongside the hyperreal reworking of the binary of life/death. ‘The hologram … gives us the feeling, the vertigo of passing to the other side of our own body, to the side of the double, luminous clone, or dead twin that is never born in our place, and watches over us by anticipation.’35 The temporality ascribed to the twin in this quotation is impossible on a linear model – s/he is both dead and yet unborn. The quotation provides a new metaphor for the twins’ anticipatory role: they are always already dead and constantly called into being by the doubling endemic to the hyperreal. The first presentation of the twins in The Matrix Reloaded takes up their construction as doubles that marks the end of the mirror image. They also act as a repetition of the process of duplication presented by Agent Smith earlier in the film. The twins are glimpsed on the extreme left of the low angle long shot of the Marovingian’s table at the restaurant. While the Marovingian engages Trinity, Morpheus and Neo in a discourse on the nature of causality, there is a cut to a medium shot of the twins who are seated either side of a central oriental-style hookah. The background recedes into a central ‘v’ shape like a mirror and its reflection. The white light coming in through the long multi-paned window on the left appears to be mirrored by the green tinted glass in the window on the right. The twins are identically dressed, each in a three-piece suit consisting of a long oyster coat, matching trousers and waistcoats. Both are wearing heavy, pale make-up and have their hair styled into white powdered dreadlocks. While each has his legs crossed in accordance with the central line of symmetry, the right twin is resting his arms languidly along the sides of his chair, while the left twin has his arm raised as if in preparation for a drag on the hookah. The mirroring effect of the arrangement of the mise-en-scène, which is broken by the twins’ different gestures, visually plays out the transition from the double as mirror image to the double as duplicate. The verbal form of the final credits in which they are listed as ‘Twin #1’ and ‘Twin #2’ wittily sustains the presentation of the twins as duplicates.

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While Agent Smith’s process of duplication is characterised by metaphors of disease and darkness, the twins are visually linked to death. The styling of their hair into white Rastafarian dreadlocks references Jamaican counterculture, however, the whiteness is constructed as a lack of colour, a blanching out of the typical darkness of the hairstyle. This, coupled with the distinctive pallor caused by white make-up and costuming, gives them a drained, bloodless appearance. The twins’ cadaverous look prefigures their ghost-like capacities in that they are able to pursue the Keymaker by becoming transparent and passing through solid objects such as floors, doors and car windscreens. Their transformations take the form of a kind of x-ray view, in which their clothing becomes greentinted and transparent, revealing the outline of the musculature beneath. Their faces alter, the light-tinted sunglasses reconfigured as dark, empty sockets suggesting that their eyes have rotted away. The facial skin is stretched taut as their lips are bared in a grimace revealing pointed, vampiric teeth. Importantly, the twins’ dual forms undo the opposition of life/death, they make the transition from cadaver to ghost, two different modalities of death. Moreover, the ghost form conjoins the states of life and death. It constitutes a mode of regeneration enabling the twin, whose arm is caught in a door and repeatedly shot, to morph back into shape ‘just like new’. It is also a mode of death, the twins finally transform into ghosts as they are thrown from their exploding car. Thus the twins’ ghost form presents a short-circuiting of difference, undoing the opposition of life/death, in a way that privileges the symbolism of death. For Baudrillard, the dead yet unborn twin who ‘watches over us by anticipation’ represents the precession of simulacra within the hyperreal.36 The twins’ ghost-form has an anticipatory role in that it prefigures the twins’ ‘death’ or final exit from the matrix in the exploding car. However, the accompanying grimace, featuring pointed vampiric teeth, is presented as a copy of previous filmic models, and is itself subject to the precession of simulacra. A filmic model of an awakening vampire is played out during the sequence prior to the twins’ first transformation in which Persephone helps Neo, Morpheus and Trinity to rescue the Keymaker. The Keymaker’s guards are surprised while watching the film Brides of Frankenstein. Persephone enters the room as the film shows the undead

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occupant of a coffin throwing off the lid. There is a cut to a medium long shot of the first henchman who sits up, having been lying down on the sofa, followed by a medium shot of the second jumping to his feet. The full movement from lying down to standing is thus presented by three characters, conjoining the filmic vampire and the two henchmen. The vampire’s distinctive canine-enhanced smile, performed as she advances towards her chosen victim, provides a filmic template for the twins’ devouring grimace as they advance towards the Keymaker in the next scene. Persephone’s killing of the henchman with a silver bullet suggests that the guards are werewolves rather than vampires. This distinction is elided by the Oracle’s earlier conversation with Neo, which draws together werewolves, vampires, ghosts, angels and aliens. She tells him that they are all rogue programmes that have avoided exile or deletion and continue to exist within the mainframe, disrupting the seamless presentation of the matrix. Her dialogue renders all the possible combatants equivalent as digital code – or as Neo puts it ‘programmes hacking programmes’. Importantly, the visual presentation of such programmes within The Matrix Reloaded features three variant forms of life after death: the ghostly/vampiric twins and the angelic Seraph. Moreover, the ‘undead’ characters are not ontologically contrasted with their adversaries. Trinity, Morpheus, Neo and the agents all possess similarly supernatural powers within the matrix. The prevalence of forms of life after death within the matrix in the second film reconstructs it in accordance with Baudrillard’s conception of the hyperreal as a space in which ‘everything is already dead and resurrected’.37 The readings of Agent Smith and the twins have focused on the code’s construction as a process of serial replication. Baudrillard’s analyses of reality television, the space race and genetics set out another defining feature of the code: its deterministic mode of functioning. ‘Reality’ television is said to usher in the hyperreal by causing a merging of television and reality, so that the latter becomes a form of television.38 Baudrillard draws together the mass media and the space race in his discussion of the unstoppable transformation of life into hyperreality. ‘One must think … of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other

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molecular code controls the passage from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic one of the programmed signal.’39 Interestingly, the positioning of the media in the exterior space of ‘outer orbit’ is immediately undercut by their representation as genetic code, a mode of interiority that conveys television’s new instantaneous, immediate relation with its audience.40 The transition from meaning and representation to the digital/genetic signal also plays out the loss of a spatial ‘gap’ in the form of the slash, ‘/’, between opposites, and the specular space of the mirror.41 The linking of the genetic code and the ‘programmed signal’ draws together the biological and the technological, creating a model of a single, predetermined system. For Baudrillard, the genetic code constitutes a mode of preprogramming that erases choice, transforming humanity into products of a ‘code that controls [their] combinations’.42 The use of the term ‘control’ is repeated in his later essay on cloning, in which the code is said to produce ‘identical beings assigned to the same controls.’43 While the term suggests that the code has power over dissonant individuals, it is important to recognise that the genetic code obliterates such individuals, transforming them into expressions of its own modality. The code is a system that expresses and unfolds itself through serial production: ‘Sex (or death: in this case it is the same thing) is what exceeds all the parts, all the information that can be collected on a body. Well, where is all this information collected? In the genetic formula. This is why it must necessarily want to forge a path of autonomous reproduction, independent of sexuality and of death.’44 The code thus supersedes the key differentials of male/female and life/death, its singular mode of self-expression obliterating every differential. All its products are therefore clone-like – they are rendered equivalent as expressions of a single systemic model. The prospect of the code unfolding in accordance with its own plan is outlined earlier in Baudrillard’s analysis of space exploration. Here the unfolding of the code is constructed as a spectacle that leaves the audience ‘dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation, the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events.’45 Baudrillard’s analysis of the ways in which the code undermines distinctions such

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as subject/object and active/passive, focuses on the undermining of the Freudian/Lacanian subject.46 The dumbfounded spectator is one form of the object that is retained within his work and this issue will be discussed in the next chapter. The use of the terminology of programming draws on the technological basis of the digital code – its use in computing, science and the media – to create the sense of a thoroughgoing determinism that is then applied to both the digital and the genetic codes. There can be no such thing as random chance or individual choice in a world become code.47 Of the films in the trilogy it is The Matrix Reloaded that comes closest to Baudrillard’s conception of the code in its presentation of a pre-programmed system. The theme of fate is discussed in the dialogue of the first film and plays a role in the development of the narrative. In their first meeting in the matrix, Morpheus asks Neo if he believes in fate. Neo replies: ‘No’, and on being pressed further adds: ‘Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.’ The line is echoed back to him at the end of his first meeting with the Oracle. She tells Neo that he is not The One but that Morpheus’ faith is such that he will be prepared to die for him. Neo will have to choose between saving Morpheus’ life and his own. Apologising for the bad news, the Oracle tells Neo he will feel fine shortly: ‘You’ll remember you don’t believe in any of this fate crap. You’re in control of your own life. Remember?’ The Oracle’s predictions are played out in the development of the narrative. Neo ‘dies’ saving Morpheus, proving that he is not The One. However, he is instantly restored to life by Trinity, whose whispered confession that she has fallen in love with him in accordance with the Oracle’s prediction, persuades him that he is The One. The presentation of the doubled ending, death and resurrection, constructs the flow of the narrative as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The second film begins with a dream sequence, which features Trinity in action on her own, thus repeating the beginning of the first film. However, the first film plays out her escape from the pursuing agents, while the second shows her death. The action sequence commences with an extreme close-up of a clock, showing 12.00 midnight. The calm is shattered by Trinity’s arrival and the sequence displays her newly upgraded powers. She dives off a roof on her motorbike, back flipping off the machine before it crashes,

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causing a building to explode, and coolly dispatching five armed guards. There is a cut to the matrix code, suggesting, like the androids that dream of electric sheep, The One dreams in code! The change to code acts as a temporal ellipsis, the return to normal visuals occurring at an unspecified later time. These begin with an aerial view of an urban street at night with high-rise structures on either side. Trinity explodes out of a window on the lower level, turning and firing at her pursuer while she flies through the air. The agent launches himself after her, both exchanging shots as they fall. The agent fires the fatal shot and there is a cut to a close-up of Trinity’s chest encased in form-hugging PVC as the bullet enters her heart. This is followed by a stationary close-up of her bloodied face, showing her mouth widening open in shock as she reacts to the fatal wound. She falls away from the camera, amid the debris of the broken windows, her guns no longer firing. There is a cut to a final long shot of her body smashing through the roof of a stationary car. Neo awakes with a start, putting his arm around Trinity who is asleep in bed with him. Her reassuring presence gives the dream the status of a future event. Neo’s first dream of Trinity’s death is presented as a premonition, the narrative structure of the flash-forward drawing attention to the issue of temporality. The presentation of the process of dreaming is thus very different in the first and second films. The first film uses the reality/dream dichotomy to pose ontological questions about the status of the dream/real worlds. In the first, Neo has a series of awakenings: twice in his own bed, after partying with Trinity and again after the nightmare of the agents’ interrogation, once within the world of the vats, and later on board the Nebuchadnezzar. The continual repetition of the motif undoes any easy opposition between real and dream worlds,48 sustaining the sense of a series of hyperreal worlds. In contrast, The Matrix Reloaded uses the dream as a means of setting up the issue of predetermination. The second film is pervaded by the question of Trinity’s impending and ­apparently unavoidable death. The shot of Trinity dying is repeated during the sequence in which she and Neo have sex, which is cross-cut with the celebratory orgy in Zion. Trinity’s expression changes as she reaches climax, her mouth gaping wide. Neo looks up into her face, burying his head

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in her shoulder, his corresponding detumescence suggested by the musical accompaniment of slides going down the scale. There is a cut to the shot of Trinity’s face after the bullet has pierced her heart and she continues to fall. The film’s presentation of female jouissance as death-like draws on a long tradition, including Lacanian psychoanalysis. Neo’s instant connection of her pleasure with her death as he appears to approach climax, also draws on a psychoanalytic model. The response arises during an unguarded moment like the unconscious memory of a traumatic event. The visual presentation of the memory spells out the connection for the audience. The issue at stake is not whether The One can possess unconscious depths but rather the change of temporality effected by the repetition of the shot. The first dream is a premonition, the second a haunting memory, which suggests that the initial flash-forward may also be a flashback. This temporal confusion is continued in Neo’s later conversation with the Oracle. She begins by referring to the predictive power of dreams, telling him that he will have to find the source where ‘the path of The One ends’, adding: ‘You’ve seen it, in your dreams, haven’t you? The door made of light?’ Neo tells her that on going through the door he sees Trinity falling. The Oracle asks if he sees Trinity die and he lies, saying ‘No’. Her response suggests that she doesn’t believe the answer: ‘You have the sight now Neo. You are looking at the world without time.’ While the line clearly suggests that Neo now has the ability to foretell the future this is interpreted as a suspension of temporality – a world without time. In contrast with their previous conversation, the Oracle does not tell Neo of a choice he will make in the future, saving Morpheus or himself, but instead informs him that he has already chosen Trinity’s death. Her death is thus reconstructed as a past event in that Neo is merely trying to understand his choice. Neo refuses to countenance the Oracle’s argument, asking ‘What if I can’t. What happens if I fail?’ She replies slowly and deliberately stressing each syllable: ‘Then Zion will fall’. The Oracle’s reference to ‘the path of The One’ draws on the religious imagery of Messianic predestination. There is only one path for Neo and as the chosen One he has no choice but to fulfil it. Baudrillard’s analysis of predetermination arising from the model

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of the space race also takes up and alters Judaeo-Christian religious imagery. Like worshippers who are privileged to see God in all His perfection, the spectator is struck dumb by a perfect ‘model of programmatic infallibility’.49 For Baudrillard, ‘the immanent wonder’ of the system unfolding is also the spectator’s response.50 Unlike the awestruck worshipper who is the opposite of a perfect, objective divinity, the spectator of the space race is utterly bound up with the spectacle s/he witnesses. The dizzying heights of the transcendent divine are thus reworked as a shared symptom: ‘watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws.’51 Importantly, on this model, the perfect programme unfolds in accordance with its own, singular, pre-ordained pattern. The programme thus constitutes a flawless operation of technology in which every variable has an allocated role. ‘Programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance.’52 For Baudrillard, the programme replaces God, becoming the new exemplar of infallibility while ushering in its own model of inexorable process. In contrast, The Matrix Trilogy conjoins the Judaeo-Christian imagery of divine predestination with figures of programmatic inexorability. The symbolism of The One is an example of the former, while the latter is evident in the ­Marovingian’s lengthy discussions of the inevitability of cause and effect. The most striking alternation between these two systems of explanation occurs in the complex presentation of the attacks on the power plant and the backup emergency system, which set up Neo’s journey to the source towards the end of the second film. The sequence in which the plans are discussed is interspersed with twelve flash-forwards, which feature two different voice-overs: the Keymaker and Morpheus. Each offers a particular perspective on the inexorable unfolding of events, whose inevitability appears to be reinforced by their presentation in the narrative form of flashforwards. The Keymaker’s role in the second film is comparable to Morpheus’ in the first in that they offer necessary narrative exposi­­ tion, but neither provides the full picture. Both deliver their pronouncements while seated in the ubiquitous, rust-coloured, button-backed, leather armchairs. While the Keymaker is a less glamorous and authoritative figure than Morpheus, his dialogue is

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also linked to an oral tradition. The Keymaker’s first long speech begins: ‘There is a building. Inside this building there is a level where no elevator can go and no stair can reach. This level is filled with doors. These doors lead to many places, hidden places, but one door is special. One door leads to the source.’ The repetition of key words: level, doors, places, gives the speech a rhythmic quality that is characteristic of oral story telling. The Keymaker’s voice is lowpitched with a slightly husky timbre, Randall Duk Kim’s pleasing vocal tones making his dialogue reminiscent of a bedtime story on the radio. The Keymaker’s speech forms a voice-over for long shots of the building and the specific level referenced. The final word ‘source’ is immediately followed by a long shot of the level, whose mirrored green surface is being fractured by circular red points of fire, which eventually explode. The circular pattern recalls previous presentations of the underlying substance of the machine code (Seraph’s body and the drill) discussed at the beginning of the chapter. However, the explosive form of the fire emphasises the machine code’s destructive capacity. There is a cut back to a close-up of Neo, suggesting that the image is his own premonition or memory. The Keymaker then adds that attacks on the building trigger a bomb, providing a belated explanation for the explosion, which also suggests that the attempt to send The One back to the source will be/has previously been unsuccessful. The Keymaker’s dialogue emphasises the singular nature of the pre-programmed system: ‘The system is based on the rules of a building. One system built on another.’ Morpheus replies: ‘Electricity’, and the Keymaker responds: ‘If one fails, so must the other.’ He elaborates a three-pronged attack, his description forming a voice-over for the first three flash-forwards, each of a different party at the site of their respective missions. Niobe is to blow up the main power plant, while Soren and his crew take out the emergency back up system. This will provide Neo, Morpheus and the Keymaker with the requisite 314 seconds for The One to open the door and get to the source. The Keymaker concludes: ‘All must be done as one. If one fails, all fail.’ The pause between the two sentences is filled by the fifth flash-forward, showing the Nebuchadnezzar while Neo and Morpheus are jacked into the matrix. In the final medium shot

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of Link his console forms the bottom line of an equilateral triangle completed by two lines of light in the background. The triangle acts as a mathematical symbol for the necessary interdependence of the three teams and is congruent with the programmatic discourse of functionality used elsewhere by the Keymaker. His final words: ‘all fail’ are accompanied by the sixth flash-forward, which comprises an extreme close-up of a clock, a repetition of the first image in the film’s opening dream sequence, however, the time is earlier: 11.47. The commentary is then taken up by Morpheus who informs the teams that 12.00 midnight marks a shift change in both buildings. He continues: ‘All of our lives we have fought this war. Tonight, I believe, we can end it.’ His next remarks form an ironic voice-over for the eighth flash-forward, which shows Soren’s operatives aboard the Vigilant responding to the threat of attack by squids. Morpheus intones: ‘Tonight is not an accident. There are no accidents’, as an operator thunders along the bridge to defend the ship and there is a cut to an extreme close-up of one of the bridge bolts shearing. The sequence is completed in the twelfth flash-forward when the bridge shears through killing the operative standing on it as well as the man positioned below in what appears to be an entirely random, freak accident. However, the apparent discontinuity between the voice-over commentary and the visuals is eradicated by the effects of the erasure of Soren’s operatives, which are shown later. Left unprotected, the Vigilant is blown up by squids, causing the rest of the team to die and ensuring that Trinity has to enter the matrix in order to take out the back up system. The accident thus thwarts Neo’s efforts to save Trinity from impending death by keeping her safely on board the Nebuchadnezzar, shown in their conversations in flash-forwards four and ten. The utterly random nature of the primary cause of Trinity’s entering the matrix strongly suggests that her intervention and subsequent death are inevitable. Morpheus’ commentary takes up the Keymaker’s references to the three teams acting as one, translating it into the discourse of divine predetermination. ‘We have not come here by chance …. When I see three objectives, three captains, three ships, I do not see coincidence. I see providence. I see purpose.’ The alliterative juxtaposition of providence and purpose takes up the very term used by the Keymaker – that it is his purpose to know about the

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source – and transforms it from a figure of programmatic functionality to one of divine guidance. The change is also expressed by the transition from the mathematical symbol of the triangle to the Christian symbol of the three ships that announce the birth of Christ. Morpheus continues, emphasising the italicised words: ‘I believe it is our fate, to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this night holds, for each and every one of us, the very meaning of our lives.’ While the Keymaker explains that his purpose is the reason he exists, for Morpheus being part of the divine plan adds a symbolic dimension to mere existence. When Niobe does manage to interject, complaining that Morpheus could be wrong and the prophecy could be ‘bullshit’, he briefly appears to entertain the possibility. However Morpheus’ speech ends with the lines: ‘What if I am right? What if the prophecy is true? What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn’t that worth fighting for? Isn’t that worth dying for?’ While the last two sentences are grammatically structured as questions, Fishburne flattens the intonation of the last two words, transforming them into emphatic statements in an aural demonstration of faith becoming fact. Morpheus’ pronouncements mark the end of the sequence in which the plans are discussed and there is a temporal ellipsis as the film cuts to the presentation of the three teams and their respective missions unfolding in ‘real time’. The first scenes cross-cut between Soren’s attack on the power station, and his two operatives on the Vigilant as it is blown up, cutting back to show the immediate deaths of Captain and crew within the matrix. The playing out of the different missions also utilises some of the shots previously presented in the flash-forwards. The temporal presentation of the twelve flash-forwards is already complex in that they do not occur in narrative order. The third flash-forward comprises four shots, which combine to show Neo, Morpheus and the Keymaker in the matrix. The third shot is an extreme close-up of the Keymaker’s hand as he finishes filing the key of the door to the source. The next flash-forward, number four, clearly takes place earlier, in that it shows Neo and Trinity on the Nebuchadnezzar as he begins to broach the subject of her not accompanying him on the mission. The ‘real time’ sequence takes up the shots in the third flashforward using them separately and out of order. The first shot to

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be repeated is the extreme close-up of the Keymaker’s hands filing the key with an additional rack focus to his face as he exclaims: ‘It is done.’ The shot is cross-cut with shots of Trinity and Link looking at the main console on the Nebuchadnezzar, tracking the three different crews. Importantly, the repetition of the material from the flashforwards picks up and expands a particular aspect of their complex presentation. The narrative form can thus be seen to work in a different way from the emphasis on the single unfolding of events presented by the Keymaker’s and Morpheus’ dialogue. The nonsequential ordering of the twelve flash-forwards suggests that they do not operate according to the laws of cause and effect. Instead, each flash-forward can be seen to constitute a set of variables: characters, their choices, and events, which can be broken down further and replayed in different combinations. The small differences in the ‘real time’ replay of the flash-forwards suggest that each set of variables could be played out slightly differently. Thus it is conceivable that Trinity refuse to stay on board the Nebuchadnezzar, or that Soren should succeed and Niobe fail, changing the options across a continuum. Jonathan Romney comments that The Matrix Reloaded has an ‘elliptical quality … an unfinished feel at odds with the closure we expect from Hollywood sci-fi.’53 However, he argues that this is because the narrative events are fully presented in other media tie-ins: for example Niobe’s destruction of the power plant, which features extensively in the Enter the Matrix game.54 In contrast, I am suggesting that the complex presentation of the flash-forwards gives the film its distinctive, precarious quality. The ellipses and differential repetitions set up the possibility of playing out different combinations of systemic variables. The Matrix Reloaded can therefore be seen to draw on two models of the code’s determinism. While the Keymaker’s dialogue is closest to Baudrillard’s analysis of the flawless unfolding of technology, the patterns of variables and their possible combinations set up by the flash-forwards take up his conception of the genetic code. The models of control are different. The technological/digital code unfolds in accordance with its own single pre-determined plan, eliminating variables in advance. By contrast, the genetic code exhibits its singular control by playing out an infinite series of

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combinations. Baudrillard’s most extensive analysis of the genetic code occurs in the chapter on cloning, in which the ­products of such combinations have been reduced to the endless proliferation of the same. However, the genetic code is also operative in the production of non-identical series of variables, differently raced and sexed human beings, who are then all rendered fundamentally the same as expressions of its own singular modality. The film draws on the genetic in that characters and their choices constitute two forms of the variables presented within the flash-forwards. The technique of playing through and gesturing towards other potential combinations is, however, coupled with constant reminders that the characters are programmes, thus presenting the genetic code’s capacity for infinite combinations as a feature of computer programming. The meeting of Neo and the Architect towards the end of The Matrix Reloaded is the most striking example of the trilogy’s complex reworking of its Baudrillardian source material. The density of the visual and aural references is outstanding, drawing together the key motif of the television screen, as well as the deterministic and duplicative aspects of the code. Neo’s transition to the room takes the form of a visual joke. He opens the door of light and his shadowy outline gradually disappears to be replaced by a circle of white light, a moment of transfiguration into celestial brightness. However, his ascension to the heavens is disrupted by the appearance of glitching lines across the skies, containing the constellations within a television screen. The transition encapsulates Baudrillard’s conception of the technological code’s undercutting of the very possibility of transcendence – there is no space beyond systemic control. The use of the glitching television screen to convey entrapment is previously established in the transition to the room where agents interrogated Neo in the first film discussed in chapter three. In that scene, the lines were ribbon-like expanses of rainbow light, suggesting his confinement within the hyperreal ‘depths’ of the screen itself. In this later transition, the glitching lines are made up of oblong pixels that shimmer with different colours. The pattern of line upon line of oblongs mirrors the curving wall of television screens that surround Neo and the Architect in the following sequence. The form of the glitch thus prefigures the pattern of the mise-en-scène, drawing

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attention to the doubled modality of Neo’s entrapment, which is both physical and temporal. Neo is positioned in front of a curving wall of television screens, all of which show a medium close-up of him in front of a wall of screens. The images on the screens change from closed-circuit television to the presentation of past events from Neo’s life in response to his question: ‘Why am I here?’ The Architect answers: ‘Your life is the remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent in the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which … I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.’ Neo replies: ‘You haven’t answered my question’, and the Architect responds, somewhat patronisingly: ‘Quite right. That was quicker than the others.’ There is a cut to a medium close-up of Neo, the background screens featuring identical medium close-ups of his predecessors, whose voices are now audible as each reacts to the news of ‘others’. After the Architect tells Neo that he is the sixth version, there is a cut to a long shot of a section of the screens, showcasing his predecessors’ different ­reactions, which range from outright rejection to laughter. The camera zooms in on the central image of Neo’s predecessor’s thoughtful puzzlement, as he comments: ‘There are only two possible explanations. Either no-one told me’, the television glitches as the camera continues to zoom in, appearing to pass through the screen, to show the present version of Neo positioned in front of the bank of televisions, as he slowly finishes the sentence: ‘or no-one knows.’ The transition between the glitching television screens conjoins past and present versions of Neo. The continuity is also rendered aurally in that Neo #6 completes his predecessor’s sentence. Both aspects reinforce the television screen’s status as a key motif of physical and temporal entrapment. Importantly, the banks of screens juxtaposing the reactions of Neo #1 to Neo #5 also provide the means to present the flashbacks as a parallel series. The previous use of flash-forwards offered a sequential, but non-causal, presentation of a range of variables, one after the other. In contrast, the visual juxtaposition of the five flashbacks alongside Neo #6 sets out a range of variables along a continuum, presenting all the different combinations (so far) at the same time. While their reactions to being informed of having predecessors varies, all the variants of

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Neo unite to denounce the Architect’s claim that Zion is about to be destroyed (again) in a simultaneous chorus of ‘Bullshit!’ The visual presentation of the continuum also draws attention to the similarities between the variables. In accordance with the duplicative aspect of the genetic code, all of them are dressed in exactly the same way, black being the only colour of choice. The identical costuming recalls Agent Smith’s mode of serial duplication, which takes the more formal form of a dark city suit and black patent laceups. Importantly, all the variants of Neo have arrived in the same place, to make the same choice. The Architect tells Neo that the function of The One is to return to the source and effect the reinsertion of the primary programme, enabling the system to reboot and begin again. The One is also required to choose 23 individuals, 16 female and 17 male, to rebuild Zion. While the Architect does not make this explicit, the total of 23 corresponds to the number of human genomes in the genetic code. This oblique reference to genetics is not expanded in the later dialogue and the film offers a technological account for the occurrence of variant combinations. The differences between the variant forms of Neo are resolved through a return to the discourse of functionality. The Architect takes up the Keymaker’s understanding of the pre-programmed system, although Helmut Bakaitis clearly struggles to deliver his lines with the nuanced inflection of Randall Duk Kim. The dialogue serves to unite the different combinations via references to programmatic functionality. The sequence explicitly marks the end of the model of divine predestination. In the first film, Morpheus tells Neo of a prophecy that foretells the second coming of The One, who will ‘hail the destruction of the matrix, an end to the war and freedom for … [the] people.’ The absolute impossibility of such transcendence is apparent from the second film’s presentation of Neo’s transition to the meeting place with the Architect. Far from being that which rises above or destroys the system, Neo is its preset failsafe device. The Architect’s characterisation of Neo is ambiguous in that he is both the means by which the system reboots and a systemic anomaly that has eluded elimination. This resembles Baudrillard’s analysis of cancer, which acts as both the most virulent form of the code and a mode of ‘silent disobedience of the injunctions of

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the … code.’ Within the same endnote, Baudrillard suggests that cloning is equally ambiguous: ‘it is at once the triumph of a controlling hypothesis, that of the code and of genetic information, and an eccentric distortion that destroys its coherence.’55 Importantly, the terms used to describe potential dissonance, anomaly and distortion, reflect its status as a product of the system. Baudrillard goes on to suggest that cloning can never completely ensure the absolute identity of its products, rendering the eternity of the same an unattainable ideal. ‘Besides, it is probable (but this is left to a future story) that even the “clonic twin” will never be identical to its progenitor, will never be the same, if only because it will have had another one before it.’56 Thus, even serial duplication results in minimal differentiation caused by the variable sequential placing of each element in the same series. The Matrix Reloaded explores the possibility of differentiation between elements in the same series in its presentation of the six variant forms of Neo. Interestingly, the Architect’s comment that Neo #6 is ‘quicker than the others’ is suggestive of a sequential model of progress – each one being faster, stronger and brighter than its predecessors. This constitutes a significant departure from Baudrillard’s brief acknowledgement of the possibility of minimal differentiation. The second film sets up a potential clash between the possible differentiation between elements of a sequence and the overarching model of functionality, in which all the variant forms fulfil a single purpose. This problem is explicitly played out with reference to Trinity whose death appears to be a necessary part of her function as the lover of The One. Trinity’s death takes the form of both a flashback, Neo #6’s traumatic memory, and flash-forward, the opening premonition/ dream, because Trinity has already died five times and is about to do so again. The inevitability of her death is suggested by the crosscutting from the conversation between Neo and the Architect to Trinity’s fight with the agent. Each of the two cross-cut scenes end with Trinity being floored by the agent, clearly on the losing end of the exchange of blows. Shortly after the second, the close-up of her face as the fatal bullet enters her heart is shown on one of the monitors behind Neo and repeated on a screen in the background of the subsequent reverse shot of the Architect. The top screen to the left

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of the Architect plays out Trinity’s full fall away from the camera, while the screen below it features images of her fight with the agent. The juxtaposition of the flashback of her death with images taken from the cross-cut scenes underscores the inexorability of her coming death. While Trinity’s death accords to a Baudrillardian model of programmatic inexorability, she is also crucial to the formation of a new model of differential repetition. Trinity alone is responsible for a key difference between Neo #6 and the previous models. The Architect tells Neo that all versions of The One are marked by ‘a profound attachment to the rest of your species.’ While his five predecessors ‘experienced this in a general way’, Neo has formed a specific attachment by falling in love with Trinity. The change takes place at the end of the first film. Previously oblivious to Trinity’s interest, Neo returns her affections after she brings him back to life with a kiss. This resurrection of Neo is also a point of transformation, a moment of differential repetition in which The One is reconstructed as a lover by the woman whose destiny it is to love him. While the kiss is clearly an inversion of Sleeping Beauty, a reversal that will be discussed fully in the next chapter, Trinity’s resurrection of Neo changes the nature of The One. Reconstructed according to Trinity’s desires and wishes, Neo #6 is an idealised romantic who will choose the apocalyptic annihilation of all humanity rather than allow her to die. This transformation in the role of The One goes beyond the developmental model of sequential variation within a single series in which Neo simply becomes brighter and better. Importantly, in this instance, the variations caused by the potentially different relations between variables have the capacity to change the variable itself. Thus Neo #6 is different from the others because he is created by/through a new relation to Trinity. However, this mode of differentiation does not open up a new space beyond the system. While Neo chooses to rescue Trinity, ensuring that she does not die at the end of the second film, the over-arching model of programmatic functionality remains in play. Trinity’s death at the end of the third film enables Neo to return to the source of the source, machine city, and reboot the system, thus ultimately helping him fulfil the function of The One.

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The Matrix Reloaded demonstrates a depth of engagement with many aspects of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. From Agent Smith’s nihilistic mode of serial duplication, which is itself wittily duplicated by the Twins, to the overall presentation of the hyperreal as haunted, undead space. Moreover, the complex presentation of an overarching, pre-programmed system draws on Baudrillard’s deterministic presentation of the code. The second film articulates a key question: can there be any possibility of change within a pre-programmed system? The possibility of an assenting answer is created through the film’s subtle and complex changes to Baudrillard’s theory. The presentation of two different models of code in the second film: the digital green of the matrix and the fires of machine city, clearly constitutes a point of departure from Baudrillard’s work. Moreover, the transition from the harmonious beauty of the fiery patterns of Seraph’s body and the excavating drill to the dangerous explosive power of the source demonstrates the paradoxical duality of the fiery machine code. The presentation of multiple codes, one with divergent capacities, fundamentally changes Baudrillard’s emphasis on the singularity of the code. The film’s take up of the genetic code’s capacity for different combinations, which is reworked as a feature of technological programming, sets up a new model of potential relations between the variables. Importantly this model of potential inter-relations between variables departs from Baudrillard’s model of the code in two ways. The multiple forms of inter-relations challenge Baudrillard’s exclusive focus on opposition and the elimination of opposition. Secondly, Trinity’s contribution to the creation of Neo #6 is an example of a new relation between variables changing the variables themselves, thus going beyond serial replication and opening up a new model of ­differential repetition.

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Notes 1 This chapter builds on a previous article: C. Constable, ‘Baudrillardian revolutions: repetition and radical intervention in the Matrix Trilogy’, in S. Gillis (ed.) The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 151–61. 2 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 27. 3 Ibid., p. 24. 4 Ibid., p. 30. 5 Ibid. p. 82. Italics on the word ‘single’ are mine. 6 For a discussion of the artificial nature of the genetic code see Baudrillard, ­Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 98–9. 7 I must thank my friend and colleague, Angie Hobbs, for providing me with the information on Heraclitus. 8 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 95. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 145. 11 Ibid., p. 95. 12 Ibid., p. 97. 13 Jean Baudrillard draws on Walter Benjamin to formulate this aspect of his ­analysis of cloning, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 99–100. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 95. 16 Ibid., p. 96. 17 Ibid. The gendering of the scenario is very clear – the masculine one can now do without the feminine other. 18 S. Freud, ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’, J. Strachey trans., in A. Richards (ed.) On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 323–44. 19 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 96–7. 20 Ibid., p. 30. 21 Ibid. My italics. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 100. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., pp. 100–1. 26 Ibid., p. 101. 27 Ibid., p. 100. 28 Ibid., p. 102. The endnote is unnumbered. My italics. 29 This resemblance is also noted by Stefan Herbrechter who argues that Agent Smith is uncannily similar to Neo. S. Herbrechter, ‘The posthuman subject in The Matrix’, in S. Herbrechter and M. Diocaretz (eds) The Matrix in Theory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 272–3.

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Codes  125 30 While Lisa Nakamura also argues that the mode of serial replication is viral, she offers an interesting reading of the multiplication of Agent Smiths as an instance of ‘invasive whiteness’. However, she overlooks the symbolism of darkness in the film’s presentation of the process of duplication. L. Nakamura, ‘The multiplication of difference in post-millennial cyberpunk film: the visual culture of race in The Matrix Trilogy’, in S. Gillis (ed.) The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, pp.  129–31. 31 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 95. 32 Ibid., p. 97. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 11. 35 Ibid., p. 106. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 6. 38 Ibid., p. 27. 39 Ibid., p. 30. 40 The transition from orbital exterior to biological interior is similar to the visual transition from stormy skies to the foetal eyelid in the scene in the construct in The Matrix that was discussed in chapter one. 41 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 101. 42 Ibid., p. 29. 43 Ibid., p. 99. 44 Ibid., p. 98. 45 Ibid., p. 34. 46 Ibid., p. 29. 47 Ibid., p. 31. 48 Herbrechter, ‘The posthuman subject in The Matrix’, pp. 278–9. 49 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 34. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Romney, ‘Everywhere and nowhere’, Sight and Sound, 13:7 (2003), p. 26. 54 Ibid. 55 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 102, unnumbered endnote. 56 Ibid.

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5

Beyond nihilism

I

t is well known that Neo’s first scene in The Matrix contains the only on-screen appearance of the trilogy’s key text: Simulacra and Simulation. As demonstrated in chapter three, the presentation of Neo and his computer screen offers a reversion of traditional subject/object relations, constructing Neo as another screen. After Neo has awoken in accordance with his computer’s commands, the screen displays further baffling messages, including: ‘Follow the white rabbit’ and ‘Knock, knock, Neo’. The second is not the beginning of a bad joke but a demonstration of the computer’s predictive powers, in that the message is immediately followed by a knock on the door. This can be regarded as the first example of the deterministic nature of the matrix. It is important to note that Baudrillard’s characterisations of the screen and the code are already in play before the book appears in the scene. On answering the door, Neo is confronted by Choi, who wishes to purchase some illegal virtual reality discs. Neo walks back into the room, reaching for a large, green cloth-bound volume, with the title, ‘SimulacrA & SimulatioN’, picked out in gold lettering. The visual presentation of the on-screen volume gives it the look of an eminent literary classic, differentiating it from the slim-line paperback that is currently available for purchase. The visual changes prefigure the trilogy’s take up and transformation of Baudrillard’s key concepts and arguments. The volume’s depth is also necessary for its narrative function as a hiding place for Neo’s virtual reality contraband. While anti-postmodern critics have made much of the volume’s illusion of depth, its presentation is both a compliment and a Baudrillardian joke in that the book is about the power of

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appearances. Neo opens the volume to reveal the first page of ‘On Nihilism’, which has been transposed to midway through the book and reversed to appear on the left rather than the right hand side. Jim Rovira argues that the chapter title is placed in shot ‘to direct viewers to a specific referential point for the film’, suggesting the importance of the final essay for the trilogy as a whole.1 Baudrillard’s final essay is interesting because it does not act as a summation of the arguments presented in Simulacra and Simulation, but rather offers a further shift or final twist of thought, thus necessitating a re/reading of the volume as a whole. In addition, the essay contains an unusual moment of self-reflection in which the philosopher articulates and comments on his own theoretical position. Across the volume, Baudrillard’s key concepts of the hyperreal and the code are repeatedly defined in terms of their destructive effect; both combine to mark the end of reality, truth, chance and choice.2 The final essay picks up on these arguments to offer a moment in which Baudrillard styles himself as a prophet of the postmodern apocalypse. I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances … The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances … I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyse the second revolution … that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances.3

Tracing the trajectory of the first two stages of nihilism, the modern and the postmodern, does not lead to a neat presentation of a new, third phase. Baudrillard argues that the second stage marks the end of dialectic and thus that there can be no resolution of the two movements into a further third stage.4 Nihilism is constituted as an unacceptable form of idealism because it posits the possibility of a third stage beyond the destruction of meaning – even if this takes the apocalyptic form of the end of everything. Baudrillard comments: ‘nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a ­Weltanschauung of catastrophe’.5 The final essay can thus be seen to pose a key ­question: ‘is there a third stage of revolution that can create or sustain spaces

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outside the system?’ The answer is an unequivocal ‘no’. There is nothing outside the system. Importantly, this means that the self-professed nihilist has to acknowledge that his own statement of his theoretical position is untenable. The nihilistic advocation of the apocalypse is no longer feasible because the system opposes it with its own ‘nihilism of neutralization’, which has ‘the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.’6 In this way, even spaces entirely formulated by negation, such as the apocalypse, are ultimately expressions of the logic of the system itself. In a characteristic reversal, Baudrillard’s moment of self-reflection does not result in a neat summation and recommendation of his theoretical position, delineating its usefulness for current debate, but instead generates the recognition that he has reached an ‘insoluble’ impasse.7 The Matrix Trilogy takes up Baudrillard’s account of the two stages of nihilism: the destruction of appearances and the destruction of meaning, in its presentation of two key characters. From his discussion of the prophecy with Neo, it is clear that Morpheus believes he has found a reality outside the matrix, represented by the realm of the vats in which the coppertops are incarcerated and the free city of Zion. Morpheus expects Neo to generate a revolution that will destroy the matrix. This can be seen to correspond to the first stage of nihilism – the destruction of appearances in the name of truth. Smith’s endeavours to destroy the matrix through serial replication can also be seen as nihilistic. He does not believe in a reality outside the system, offering a properly postmodern sense of revolution. However, Smith’s apocalyptic aims are as idealist as those of Morpheus, in that both believe their actions can bring about the death of the system itself.8 Importantly, these models of revolution are superseded by the trilogy’s complex presentation of systemic inter-relations, in terms of both specific characters and the three hyperreal worlds, which go beyond the possible and impossible forms of nihilism that Baudrillard delineates. Baudrillard’s final conclusion, there is no possibility of a revolution creating a way out of the system, affects an alternative line of argument that is briefly sketched in Simulacra and Simulation. He delineates two rather different ways of undermining the system from within: strategies of refusal, and the strategic ­exaggeration

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of the system’s modes of reversibility and reversion to provide ‘reversibility without a counterpart’.9 The first, strategies of refusal, are explored by comparing the ‘insoluble double bind’ of those who are caught up in and constituted by the system with the contra­dictory demands that the adult world imposes on children.10 ‘Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as auto­nomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute ­themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.’11 Baudrillard argues that the child responds to contradictory demands by developing a doubled set of strategies of refusal. Thus the requirement of becoming a subject is opposed by ‘an object’s resistance’, which comprises: ‘childishness, hyperconformism [sic.], total dependence, passivity, idiocy’; while the requirement of becoming an object is opposed by ‘the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood.’12 Baudrillard’s argument is that it is only the subject’s strategies for refusing the position of object that are currently regarded as subversive and libratory. In contrast, he argues that the object’s refusal of the subject’s positioning is potentially the more powerful strategy. This is because taking up the position of speaking subject/adult plays into the way in which the system works, whereas the rejection of speech is ‘a refusal of meaning’ and a moment of ‘non-reception’ of the system.13 This strategy is articulated by a reworking of two familiar figures – the process of doubling and the mirror: ‘it is the equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it.’14 In its traditional form, the double as mirror image or dream acts as the opposite of the viewer/dreamer, thereby forming an anchoring point, the repository of the soul or idealised self.15 These binary oppositions are undercut by the logic of the hyperreal and the code, which render all opposition fundamentally equivalent, seen in the figure of the mirror as Möbius strip.16 In contrast, the object’s strategy ‘(if one can still speak of strategy)’ involves becoming a mirror and thus confronting the system with its own logic, albeit one that has been doubled – exaggerated – to the point of no longer working.17 This mirror does not constitute a return to the depths of Alice’s looking glass because, in this instance, reflection has been reconstructed as

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deflection – a depthless non-absorption of meaning – that disrupts the smooth running of the system. The second way of undermining the system from within is set out in the final essay. Baudrillard defines terrorism as ‘the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder’.18 The remainder has previously been defined as ‘the very figure of reversibility’, rendering oppositional terms, such as life/death and masculine/feminine, fundamentally equivalent.19 Terrorism would therefore appear to be a process that reverses the remainder’s own reversibility, however, Baudrillard’s examples take the form of a single twist, which constitutes a disruptive mode of reversal. He offers two instances: ‘just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master.’20 The ­examples parallel two different modes of disruptive reversal: the deconstructive power of irony and the slave’s momentary ­suspension/destruction of the master’s power. Baudrillard argues that such gestures serve to push the system to its limits, even to the point of death, through their strategic deployment of derision and violence. This acts as the prelude to another famous self-declamation: ‘I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.’21 Importantly, this positive statement, which opens up the possibility of finally demolishing the system and escaping systemic control, is immediately undercut by the very next sentence. ‘But such a sentiment is utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist if there were still a radicality – as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death … still had meaning.’22 The lack of a third stage in the dialectical process renders all radical gestures equally futile. In this way, the final essay can be seen to take up the model of the code as a pre-programmed system that absorbs all opposition. ‘It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.’23 Both revolution and revelation are reliant on the conception of a space beyond/ outside the system. This has, once again, been rendered impossible, by the repeated technique of undercutting the first-person proclamations.

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Rovira also notes the undercutting of the potential of theoretical violence in the final essay’s presentation of the power of the closed system. He argues that this raises meta-critical questions concerning the status of Baudrillard’s own writing and the purpose of his theorising. What is the purpose of the knowledge gained by his analysis if even Baudrillard’s own theoretical violence is ineffectual? Is the social critic and theorist a clownish figure pointing out incongruities that we all accept? … Or is there an optimism masked by the mere act of writing, one that presupposes “enlightenment” in the form of knowledge of the individual’s material system of relations can empower the individual to break free, to some degree, of the system in which all are caught?24

Having posed the questions, Rovira goes on to assert that the function of Baudrillard’s writing is to set up the possibility of a space outside the system, indicated by the take up of the traditional discourse of rational ‘enlightenment’. While this first reference appears in quotation marks – an indication of its highly problematic status – later references contain no such visual caveats: ‘[Baudrillard’s] exposé of the mechanisms of societal control demands a telos that takes the form of an enlightened subjectivity attained by his readers’.25 Baudrillard’s writing is thus said to rely implicitly on the transcendental categories that his models of the hyperreal and the code explicitly undermine. Rovira’s reading of Baudrillard’s work takes the familiar narrative form of the return of the repressed. The categories of the enlightenment: revelation, revolution and subjectivity, return to haunt an extreme systemic model that has prematurely announced their demise. Importantly, for Rovira, postmodern attempts to recreate the subject as an object constituted by and through systemic relations that it cannot ever transcend, have had the reverse effect of creating a desire for such transcendence.26 The ‘postmodern individual is left desperately seeking to transcend a self which has now become its prison, allowing narratives of religious awakening to an outward, transcendent, immaterial ‘reality’ to have an almost irresistible appeal.’27 This trajectory, from dystopian postmodern models of systemic control to the utopian possibilities of transcendence presented by various forms of the divine, is said to constitute the narrative of The Matrix Trilogy.

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Rovira argues that the Wachowski brothers’ take up of religious imagery enables them to move beyond ‘the destruction of appearances to the construction of a new world, from Baudrillard’s nihilism to the Trilogy’s budding fragile utopia.’28 The use of religious imagery does not establish the existence of a transcendental divinity, such as the Judaeo-Christian God.29 Instead, the imagery functions to open up the possibility of individual enlightenment and progress, marking the return of the rational subject who transcends systemic, material relations. ‘The films’ unabashed optimism is that individuals can finally understand the system in which they are caught well enough to manipulate it according to their own wills, working independently of the will of the system, becoming programmers, becoming gods that can shape their environment to their own wills.’30 The quotation explicitly parallels becoming a true subject/programmer with becoming divine, reworking transcendence as a movement outside/beyond systemic relations that enables the subject to manipulate and transform the system itself. Rovira contends that this resurrection of the subject is one that Baudrillard ‘implicitly values … however much he silences the language of individual enlightenment’.31 However, his analysis of Baudrillard’s work and concomitant reading of the trilogy is highly problematic. While Rovira’s assertion that ‘On Nihilism’ is profoundly influential for the trilogy as a whole is entirely plausible, the key issue at stake is how to read the essay. Rovira’s response to the undercutting of the first-person pronouncements: ‘I am a nihilist’ and ‘I am a terrorist’,32 is to postulate an ‘enlightened’ reader, who serves to unify the text and return it to the tenets of analytic philosophy. It is more useful and indeed appropriate to consider the implications of the rhetorical use of the first person, whose statements are immediately undermined by the arguments presented in the subsequent text. Importantly, the final essay enacts the undercutting of the subject of knowledge, destabilising the position of ‘the one who knows’ and calling into question the very conception of Baudrillard as the Author who controls or owns his own ideas and arguments. The rhetorical strategy plays out the disintegration of the enlightened, rational subject and is thus entirely consistent with Baudrillard’s repeated emphasis on the object. Moreover, the reader is

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offered suggestions, allusions and continually shifting arguments, which they must piece together to form a fragile, precarious reading of the whole. The argument offered across ‘On Nihilism’ is complex in that the explicit repudiation of the possibility of being either a nihilist or a terrorist takes a very specific form. Thus it is impossible to be either if that involves the postulation of a space outside/beyond the system – even the minimal version of the system’s apocalyptic end. However, the last lines of the final chapter do not completely negate the possibility of terrorist strategies in that they offer an oblique reference to a specific form of reversibility: ‘appearances … are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins.’33 Seduction is a form of reactive reversibility, an ‘inverse power’ that reacts against the processes of production.34 The final reference to another form of potentially disruptive reversal keeps in play the possibility of returning the system to itself in a way that jams its workings. The traditional model of revolution as the means of ushering in the new order is thus replaced by a conception of revolution as an inherently compromised disruption of the system from within. Rovira offers Baudrillard two choices: clown or optimist, arguing in favour of the latter. However, the philosopher’s predilection for disruptive, compromised strategies of reversal strongly suggests that he is better characterised as a comic, anarchic Lord of Misrule. Importantly, Rovira’s sense of the final essay underpins the way in which he reads the trilogy. Neo’s progression across the films is said to exemplify the trajectory of becoming an enlightened subject. Thus in the first film, he faces the choice ‘between conformity and self-determination; submission to the system and the subjectivity it has defined for him or the forging of his own consciousness’. In the second, the hero discovers that his apparent choices were ‘part of the mechanism of control itself ’ and in the last he ‘unties the Gordian knot of free will and control, the very dialectic of enlightenment itself.’ The decision to make peace with the machines constitutes the exercise of free will and thus marks the reconstruction of Neo as a fully rational subject. In this reading, the religious imagery used to characterise Neo as Messiah acts as a means of opening up the possibility of transcending the system.

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Unfortunately, Rovira’s analysis is not an accurate depiction of the ways in which the religious imagery is utilised across the trilogy. As demonstrated in chapter four, Morpheus’ model of divine predestination actually undermines the conception of individual free will and choice. In addition, the sequence with the Architect explicitly marks the end of Neo’s Messianic trajectory, offering a more convincing explanation of the role of The One in terms of systemic function. This is consistent with the development of the narrative in the third film in which Neo’s death saves the three different hyperreal worlds, by causing the system to reboot thus fulfilling his function. Finally, Rovira’s focus on the concepts of free will and choice privileges Neo’s dialogue, which leads him to overlook the more complex philosophical position articulated through the figurative elements of the films’ multitracks. Importantly, Rovira’s reading downplays the depth of the trilogy’s engagement with Baudrillard. The films do not offer a facile negation of Baudrillard’s work, a simple return to the enlightenment values that he attempted to eliminate. The trilogy clearly draws on key Baudrillardian concepts, such as the hyperreal and the code; however, their metamorphoses within the films results in a significant reworking of the philosopher’s theoretical position. The trilogy does not offer an outright rejection of Baudrillard but instead articulates a different, more nuanced, postmodern position. This final chapter will demonstrate that the trilogy offers a complex solution to the problem of revolution. The solution is created through the reworking of Baudrillard’s disruptive strategies as well as the trilogy’s own model of differential repetition. Thus, the films avoid simply reiterating Baudrillard’s position or falling back into the promulgation of enlightenment individualism. The differences between the trilogy’s philosophical position and that of enlightenment individualism become obvious as soon as the hero, Neo, is compared with the self-determining and determined models typically offered by the blockbuster. The hero of the Die Hard quartet, John McClane played by Bruce Willis, possesses a working-class radicalism that constantly places him outside the rules and regulations of the white-collar capitalist system. In contrast, Neo is always visually presented as profoundly connected to the technological systems he attempts to oppose. This is evident

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from his first presentation as a screen/machine. In the first film of the Die Hard series, McClane is at odds with his higher earning wife, Holly Gennaro, whose economic emasculation of him is rectified by a crisis that demonstrates the necessity and indeed supremacy of the all action man.35 The trajectory of this action hero is thus from object to subject, from economic dependent to triumphant rescuer of his wife. McClane’s rise thus necessitates his wife’s fall because the subject requires an object to preside over. Holly is returned to her rightful position of dependent spouse, verbally signalled through her reversion to the marital surname.36 By contrast, Neo’s trajectory across the trilogy is one in which he begins as an object and only ever attains highly compromised forms of subjecthood. His resurrection as The One takes the form of being called back into being in accordance with Trinity’s demands. After Neo has been shot repeatedly in the chest at close range by Agent Smith, the screen monitoring his body on board the Nebuchadnezzar flat-lines. Trinity leans over him and whispers: ‘Neo, I’m not afraid any more. The Oracle told me that I would fall in love and that man, the man that I loved, would be The One. So you see, you can’t be dead. You can’t be. Because I love you. You hear me. I love you.’ The last sentence is immediately followed by a close-up of Trinity’s and Neo’s faces as she leans forward to kiss him. The kiss is illuminated by a shower of sparks, which are more prominently displayed in the medium shot of the embrace that follows. While the sparks are narratively justified as damage to the on board electrical equipment by the attacking squids, they suggest the electrical rebooting of Neo, sustaining his presentation as a machine. The electronic fireworks also have a traditional romantic symbolism underscored by the surging musical accompaniment, clearly suggesting that it is love that overcomes death. There is a return to the close-up of the pair as Neo begins to revive, his lips responding to Trinity’s kiss. The presentation of Neo’s resurrection draws on Sleeping Beauty, one of the most passive of all fairy tale heroines. His resurrection is also a moment of profound transformation in that Neo #6 is changed by his love for and dependence upon Trinity. Thus Neo’s recreation as The One does not take the form of a transition from object to subject, but constitutes the reconstruction of the object in accordance with a compromised subject’s desires and

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e­ xpectations. Neo #6 becomes the idealised lover who will allow humanity to perish rather than see Trinity die. While the beloved takes on the form suggested by the lover, the traditional gendering of the roles is reversed. However, the building of reversal on reversal is an attempt to set up a mode of reciprocal relations that move beyond opposition and reversal, namely love and the reflection of the lover’s expectations. This constitutes a break with Baudrillard’s model in which subject/object relations can be manifested in traditional oppositional form, or eliminated through the operations of the code/hyperreal, or disrupted through the strategies of the object. Moreover, Trinity’s and Neo’s co-dependence adds another dimension to the trilogy’s presentation of the code, setting out the possibility of a new relation between two variables. This new mode of loving co-dependence also has the power to alter the variables themselves, seen in Neo #6, creating the possibility of differential repetition, which is crucial to systemic change. The trilogy comes closest to Baudrillard’s model of the object’s strategies of refusal, represented by the figure of the deflective, non-absorbing mirror, in its presentation of Neo as the Messiah. While Trinity’s desires are crucial to his formation, the numerous and incompatible projections of others construct Neo as a mirror that has the capacity to reflect what each worshipper wants to see without taking on the weight of their expectations. The act of deflection alone – returning the image to the worshipper – is efficacious. Importantly, the construction of Neo as a surface is sustained by references to his lack of intellectual ability: from the Oracle’s estimation of him in the first film as: ‘Not too bright though’, to Agent Smith’s admonition of him towards the end of the second: ‘still using all the muscles except the one that counts!’ This aspect of Neo’s characterisation draws on Keanu Reeves’s previous appearances as the Southern Californian, valley-speaking Ted from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.37 Both character and star persona combine to ensure there are no rational depths concealed beneath the Teflon mirror. The presentation of Neo as a deflecting mirror also utilises other aspects of Keanu Reeves’s star persona. Previous films, particularly My Own Private Idaho,38 provide Reeves with roles that establish him as the object of all the different characters’ desires, be they

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male, female, homosexual or heterosexual. Joshua Clover argues that the star’s appeal also crosses national boundaries in that he possesses ‘unassignable looks (often attributed to his genetic heritage of Chinese, Caucasian and Hawaiian)’, thus enabling him to act as the hero of a blockbuster made for the international market.39 Clover reads Reeves as ‘pure surface without depth … a post-national, postmodern poster boy.’40 This first analysis of the star constructs him as a pure simulacrum, obliterating sexual and national boundaries. Clover goes on to offer a reading of the star in terms that are congruent with Baudrillard’s analysis of the object. Keanu Reeves’s … passive, post-national beauty offers itself up to a spectrum of viewers. With his capacity to motivate desire, in combination with his lack of any affect or manner that might obstruct identification, he might be said to offer a visual analogue for Žižek’s surmise regarding the philosophy of The Matrix: an alluring cipher wherein any audience might find both itself and its wishes … Reeves’s blank [sic.] isn’t white but silver; he has the most cinematic of faces.41

The description of Reeves fundamentally feminises him.42 He is consistently described in terms that traditionally accrue to the object: passive, beautiful and lacking. Most interesting is the final contention that Reeves’s appeal lies in his blankness, which resonates profoundly with Baudrillard’s analysis of the lure of the modern, celluloid seductress in Seduction. The star is by no means an ideal or sublime being: she is artificial. She need not be an actress in the psychological sense; her face is not the reflection of a soul or sensitivity which she does not have. On the contrary, her presence serves to submerge all sensibility and expression beneath a ritual fascination with the void, beneath the ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile.43

The difference between the two analyses is that Clover suggests that Reeves’s blankness constitutes a cipher in which all viewers find their fantasy figure, whereas Baudrillard argues that the nullity of the celluloid seductress is the basis of her appeal – the void itself as a source of fascination. The textual construction of Neo as object, seen in his presentation as projection screen for the computer, Sleeping Beauty,

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­ rinity’s beloved and mirror of other people’s Messianic expectaT tions, intersects with key aspects of Keanu Reeves’s star persona, creating a highly feminised hero. This explains why Neo is such an unsatisfactory hero for most philosophical commentators. Like the figure of woman within many philosophical texts, including the seductress he so strongly resembles, Reeves as Neo forms a complex, conceptual symbol who is unable to articulate what he represents. Even the final speech at the end of the first film, which is often misused as evidence that Neo is above the system, explicitly draws attention to his lack of knowledge: ‘I don’t know the future. I don’t know how this is going to end.’ The act of having a telephone conversation with the matrix, thereby constructing it as a fellow interlocutor, suggests that Neo is still profoundly connected to the system. Neo’s role of object is played out in the final encounter with Agent Smith, which will be discussed later. The numerous battle scenes between Neo and Agent Smith in the third film draw on the previous films’ reworking of Baudrillard, creating a different postmodern position. Matrix Revolutions indicates its problematic in the title: is there such a thing as revolution within a pre-programmed system? The solution is also given in the pun that forms the title, revolution as an endless, revolving cycle. The third film builds on the model of systemic variables that can be changed by new modes of inter-relation set up in the second. However, the third does not set out the differential variables in the narrative form of flash-forwards and flashbacks. Instead, the possibility of repetition and change is indicated through dialogue and the take up of key visual symbols from the previous films. These aspects intersect to offer a mode of differential repetition that opens up the possibility of systemic change. The encounter between Neo and Bane, Agent Smith in disguise, on board the Logos, uses numerous aspects of the second film’s reworking of the code. Bane’s dialogue acts as a commentary, drawing attention to the predetermined nature of this encounter with Neo. While the lines are delivered by Ian Bliss, the actor imitates Hugo Weaving’s distinctive intonation patterns, ensuring that the audience makes the connection long before Neo does! Bane disposes of Trinity, throwing her through a trap door onto the deck below, and holds Neo at gunpoint. There is a low angle,

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medium shot taken from over Neo’s shoulder as he kneels looking up at his captor, who remarks: ‘Somehow familiar isn’t it? We’ve been here before you and I, remember?’ Neo finally manages to identify his enemy, commenting: ‘It’s impossible’, to which Bane/ Agent Smith replies: ‘Not impossible, inevitable!’ Bane’s blinding of Neo replays Agent Smith’s attack on him during the interrogation scene in the first film. In the first, Neo’s mouth was sealed closed, covered over by a film of flesh; while in the second his blinding takes the form of an immediate bruising and scabbing of the eye area, the damaged flesh appearing to cover his eyes. The scene itself plays out a series of reversals, and shifts in the balance of power are presented through the use of repeated shot patterns and angles. Neo kneels at the beginning, a supplicant before Bane, whose power is presented in a low angle, medium shot. After Neo has been blinded, he wrenches a crowbar from Bane, pushing him down into a kneeling position. The reversal of power is presented through the use of a similar low angle, medium shot of Neo, raising the crowbar in order to strike. The scene also draws on previous presentations of the machine code. Once blinded, Neo is able to ‘see’ Agent Smith, in the form of the fiery machine code beneath the avatar of Bane. This view is presented in three POV shots of Agent Smith as code, still clearly identifiable through the delineation of his facial outlines, sunglasses, suit and tie. Agent Smith’s left side is edged with flames and the visual presentation of his snarling, fiery head is clearly daemonic. This is consolidated by his devil-like exit, disappearing in a shower of sparks, having been decapitated by Neo. The destructive, daemonic power of the flames recalls the negative presentation of machine code within the matrix as explosive circles of fire. Interestingly, this scene links Neo to the destructive aspects of the code for the second time, the first being the explosion that formed one of his memories. This inter-linking parallels the code’s destructiveness with Neo #6’s newfound powers. Genealogically speaking, Trinity creates Neo #6, who subsequently attacks Agent Smith, overwriting the machine programme and thereby reconstructing him as a particularly virulent enemy. The final battle between Neo and Agent Smith takes place in the matrix and draws on previous representations of the code. The lighting within the matrix in the third film has an even more

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pronounced green tint. This is reflected by the torrential rain that falls in great water droplets, which catch the light as they cascade down the screen, their brightness, colour and movement clearly recalling the digital code. The droplets are later replaced by falling shards of glass, which give the code a particularly solid, physical form. The presentation of the code consolidates its status as a foundational structure, however, it is no longer acting as a hidden substratum of the matrix. The fight between Neo and Agent Smith also presents them as code. Their second bout of hand-to-hand combat takes place within a dilapidated office building. A single take shows the pair in medium shot, silhouetted against the greentinted windows in the background, the rain trickling vertically down the panes. The reduction of the combatants to silhouettes strips them down to the level of minimal differentials, emphasising their similarity. Their battle constitutes a confrontation between one and zero, Neo and Agent Smith with his nihilistic plan of extermination through serial replication. The endless repetition of the battles, one following another, each brief defeat immediately reversed into momentary victory, shows they are locked in a pattern of opposition that appears to be irresolvable. The issue of determinism is raised throughout the final battle by both the visuals and the dialogue. During the fight in the office building, Neo somersaults backwards, propelling himself off the end wall, and causing an indentation that makes the paint fall off in a white, circular, web-like pattern. He collides with Smith in mid-air, falling backwards into the centre of the web before sliding to the floor, bleeding. His self-propelled flight has simply resulted in his recapture within the web, thus suggesting that he does indeed fight in vain, as his antagonist has contended. Agent Smith’s foreknow­ ledge is reflected in the finale: viewing Neo sprawled out across the rocks at the bottom of the crater in the rain, he comments: ‘Wait, I’ve seen this. This is it. This is the end.’ Agent Smith pauses, ­hesitating as though awaiting further instructions, something that has not occurred since the removal of his earpiece in the second film, finally recalling the rest of his lines. ‘Yes, you were lying right there, just like that, and I, I stand here, right here, and I’m supposed to say something. I say, “Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo”.’ Agent Smith’s recollection of the line constitutes

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a moment of ­repetition that should suggest everything is running in accordance with the pre-programmed system. However, Agent Smith’s faltering, hesitant delivery is uncharacteristic, as is his use of the title ‘Neo’ for the first time, rather than the customary: ‘Mr Anderson’. As Neo recovers, dragging himself to his feet once again, his antagonist physically falters, moving away from him and withdrawing from the battle. In the last part of this final confrontation, Agent Smith is uncharacteristically perturbed and dishevelled. Having lost his glasses earlier, he has been doused in mud, which adheres to his normally immaculate suit and tie. In contrast, Neo appears entirely untouched, despite floundering in the muddy water at the bottom of the crater, his face remaining a translucent white. As Agent Smith backs away, Neo encourages him to return to the fray, departing from his customary hand gesture of beckoning him to fight and taking up the opposite strategy of agreeing with him. ‘You were right Smith. You’re always right. It was inevitable.’ The final sentence acts as an echo of Agent Smith’s deterministic commentary. Agent Smith approaches Neo, drawing his hand back in preparation for the final blow and there is a cut to a medium shot of the pair in profile as his hand penetrates Neo’s body, causing the lines of black pitch to snake up and down from the central point. This is followed by a close-up of Neo’s face as the strands of pitch travel upwards. Unlike previous victims whose eyes widened in shock, Neo closes his eyes and leans his head back. The black contrasts with the whiteness of his utterly submissive face as the darkness covers it completely. His expression acts as a reminder of his failed copulation with Trinity, offering a vision of sexual ecstasy at the moment of death. Jim Rovira reads Neo’s act of self-sacrifice as an instance of Baudrillard’s strategies of disruptive reversal. ‘Neo’s final confrontation with Agent Smith, who effectively outthinks himself while Neo confident, overcomes through submission, is Baudrillard’s wry smile’.44 The reading personalises ‘the single ironic smile [that] effaces a whole discourse’,45 picking up on the use of first-person pronouncements in ‘On Nihilism’ to attribute it to the philosopher himself. However, Neo’s momentary overcoming via submission is more than a Baudrillardian reversal in that it does not bring about a nihilistic jamming or destruction of the system. Rovira contends

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that the prospect of systemic destruction is displaced onto the lone figure of Agent Smith, defined as ‘the interloper and Anti-Christ in the human/machine system of relations.’46 In this way, Neo’s defeat of Agent Smith averts the Baudrillardian apocalypse, the death of the system, offering instead a form of transcendence, a move towards enlightenment individualism and the opening up of a space beyond the system. Thus Rovira concludes: ‘this introduction of an Anti-Christ is the fulcrum on which the Wachowski Brothers’ escape from nihilism turns, the payoff of their appropriation of religious imagery, their means of escaping from apocalypse … into utopia.’47 The philosophical commentators on the DVD boxed set also read Neo’s submission as a reversal, which precedes his ultimate transcendence. The reversal is set up by Ken Wilber’s gendered analysis of the unending, irresolvable nature of the preceding battle scenes: ‘we’re going to have thunderstorms and crankiness and testosterone city for ever if they’re just going to keep at each other’s throats!’48 Wilber reads Neo’s readiness to be penetrated by Agent Smith as a key moment of feminisation. The hero’s decision ‘to give up choice, to have that union … that would be in a sense almost the feminine, it would be Trinity saying: “Let go. Don’t resist.”’49 While the dialogue Wilber attributes to Trinity sounds remarkably uncharacteristic, it is interesting that his analysis of the moment of submission revolves around her. This is largely because of the unacknowledged similarity between Trinity’s expression on approaching sexual climax in the second film, mouth gaping wide and eyes closed, and Neo’s death.50 Wilber, like Rovira, reads Neo’s death as a form of transcendence, focusing on the religious symbolism that infuses Neo’s transfiguration into light. This encompasses the cross-like lines of light that emanate from his dead body with its arms outstretched and the final apparent cremation of the body on its transporting ship, which forms the pattern of a lotus flower with petals of flame. Neo’s death and subsequent divination is said to bring about the correct balance of relations between the different worlds: Zion, the matrix and machine city, representing body, mind and spirit respectively. This rebalancing of relations is presented by becoming light, a transfiguration that heals the breaches between the three worlds.

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‘He [Agent Smith] turns to light and this is light in the matrix now and in the world of Zion … This is the real returning to source for all of them, the real returning to light, the entire matrix now is being redeemed and there … in the world of Zion, in the world of the body, the same, in a sense, healing redemption. A little bit of a Christian theme there.’51 Thus Neo’s divination constitutes a ‘real return to source’, a final moment that transforms the relations between the three worlds, fundamentally reconfiguring each into its true form. Importantly, on this reading, the final reconstruction of the three worlds marks an entirely new beginning that eliminates the cycle of opposition and of further revolutions. In contrast, I will argue that the final scenes take up and alter Baudrillard’s work, without resorting to the postulation of a transcendent utopia that lies beyond the system. While Rovira reads the expression on Neo’s face as Baudrillard’s wry smile and thus a mode of disruptive reversal; the close-up of Neo’s ecstatic face, leaning back eyes closing, is a remarkable presentation of utter passivity that accords with the strategies of the object. Baudrillard’s list of the strategies of the object includes: ‘hyperconformism [sic.], total dependence, passivity’. 52 Thus, in this final confrontation, Neo takes up his previous role of deflective mirror, offering an exaggerated image of hyper-conformism to Agent Smith’s expectations. Neo presents his antagonist with a vision of utter compliance, echoing his words and playing the victim that Agent Smith has always told him he would become. However, the assurance with which Neo performs his last actions also goes beyond the Baudrillardian model. For Baudrillard, the strategies of the object are taken up by a subject who wishes to refuse subject positioning. In contrast, Neo enacts the vision of submissive victim for his own purposes, suggesting depths beneath the Teflon mirror. These depths do not take the form of a transcendental individualism – The One is not free to do whatever he chooses. Neo’s actions result in the fulfilment of the function of The One in that they serve to regenerate the system. Neo’s death can be mapped as a reversal of Agent Smith’s nihilistic logic, expressed in the axiom: ‘everything that has a beginning has an end’, in that his intuitive recognition that the assimilation of The One will result in systemic regeneration ensures everything that has an end also has a beginning. However, Neo’s submission

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to Agent Smith is more than a reversal and more than a replay of the role of object, because it brings about a new mode of relation between the two antagonists. The presentation of Neo’s ecstatic expression during the final embrace with Agent Smith, recalls his relation to Trinity. This takes the form of an inter-dependence that reverses and surpasses subject/object opposition. The new relation between Neo and Agent Smith fundamentally alters the potential relation between the three worlds. Thus the move beyond agonistic opposition at the level of the two key variables also alters the potential relations between the matrix, Zion and the machine worlds, offering the end of warfare and the possibility of peaceful inter-relations based on the recognition of mutual interdependence. In this way, the final encounter plays out the consequences of reworking the relation between two systemic variables, Neo and Agent Smith replaying the pattern set up by Trinity and Neo #6. The relation of mutual inter-dependence changes the constitution of each of the variables, which, in turn, serves to rework the system itself. While the changes to the system are presented through the take up of religious metaphors of light, they also constitute a continuation of the presentation of the system. Thus the fiery code of machine city forms the basis for the lotus symbol as Neo’s body appears to be cremated, an image that balances this code’s dual capacity for beauty and destruction. Importantly, once within machine city, Neo engages with a technological sun complete with steel rays that he sees as a glowing ball of fire. The sun, Plato’s metaphor for transcendental truth and reality, is here reworked as a feature of the machine code, a presentation that clearly indicates its status within the overarching system. The transformation of the system is presented through the use of the figure of the black cat, the symbol of déjà vu from the first film. It appears picking its way across a green tinted pavement, glitching and disappearing as the pavement is reconfigured into a more typically grey form. The cat then reappears, repeating its brief walk across the screen, acting out the glitch in time that it represented in the first film. Thus the first object to reappear within the transfigured matrix is a symbol of systemic anomaly – another version of Neo. Furthermore, the playing out of the cat’s two appearances, doubling the doubled version of its first appearance, establishes the theme of repetition.

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Thus the peaceful relations between the three hyperreal worlds are presented as a product of a continuous cycle of differential repetition. They do not constitute the new, true mode of relations, but rather the current, precarious form created through a reworking of the past. The Matrix Trilogy moves beyond Baudrillardian nihilism by altering his conception of the closed system. The films offer a detailed engagement with his work that fundamentally metamorphoses it. The first significant change is the departure from Baudrillard’s characterisation of the hyperreal as a single ‘universe of simulation’.53 The first film sets up a range of differential realms within the hyperreal and this is augmented across the series. There are (at least) three main hyperreal worlds: the matrix, Zion and machine city, each represented by the different colour palettes of green, blue/greys, and orange/reds respectively. The multiplication of the hyperreal realms is matched by the presentation of a plurality of underlying codes: the digits comprising the matrix and the fires of machine city. Moreover, the second code displays the divergent capacities of life-enhancing warmth/light and death-dealing explosive power, thus multiplying the modalities of the already pluralised codes. These changes are important because Baudrillard’s singular hyperreal and single model of the code are characterised by one particular dynamic. This takes the form of the elimination of opposition, which causes the eradication of reality, truth and subjectivity (among other things). Furthermore, the destruction of the oppositional relation between reality/fiction, truth/lies and subject/object by the hyperreal and the code constitutes the end of all differentiation, marking the beginning of the ‘eternity of the Same’.54 The trilogy’s presentation of multiple hyperreal worlds and codes sets up a different dynamic. Rather than focusing on the drive to singularity via the elimination of opposition, the films utilise the presentation of a plurality of different worlds and codes to explore the possibility of different, positive forms of inter-relation. The possibility of other forms of inter-relation is set up in the second film in which the genetic code’s capacity for different com­binations is reworked as a feature of technological programming. This continues the strategy of pluralising key concepts, creating a multiplicity of variables in the form of characters and

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events. The possibility of different modes of inter-relations between variables is demonstrated by Neo #6’s new relation to Trinity. Their new relationality, the interdependence of mutual love, reconstructs Neo #6 and subsequently Agent Smith. Thus new models of inter-relations create change at the level of the individual variables, ­challenging Baudrillard’s conception of serial duplication by ushering in a model of differential repetition. Moreover, new modes of ­relations affect the interaction of individual variables: characters, such as Trinity, Neo and Agent Smith, the different hyperreal worlds, and their respective codes, thus opening up the prospect of systemic change. Overall, The Matrix Trilogy moves beyond Baudrillardian nihilism by offering the prospect of change within a closed system. For Baudrillard, the greatest forms of systemic disruption, brought about by the object’s strategies and modes of disruptive reversal, can only ever jam the system, or at best ensure its death. In contrast, the trilogy offers a vision of a closed system that can be transformed through the reworking of the inter-relations between the variables that construct it. The alternative modes of inter-relation are presented through the use of erotic and religious imagery. However, the use of religious language and imagery does not constitute a return to the possibility of transcendence or enlightenment individualism. There might be faith, hope and love, the greatest of which is love, however, they are presented as relations between variables. These values can be found in the relationships between Neo and significant others, specifically: Morpheus, the Oracle and Trinity. The focus on the relations of love and mutual inter-dependence enables the trilogy to move beyond Baudrillard’s nihilism. Thus, the final coda offers a vision of a fragile future in a simulacral utopia complete with pastel perfect sunrise where the pre-programmed remnants of humanity and the machines achieve a peaceful co-existence.

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Notes 1 J. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy and the future of religion’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2:2 (2005) www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol2_2/rovira.htm (accessed 12/3/07). 2 For an assessment of the function of the logic of negation in Baudrillard’s work see: C. Constable, ‘Postmodernism and film’, in S. Connor (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.  43–61; 43–7, 49–50. 3 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) pp. 160–1. 4 Ibid., p. 160. 5 Ibid., p. 161. 6 Ibid., p. 163. 7 Ibid., p. 159. 8 For a different analysis of Agent Smith as a utopian nihilist see T. S. Hibbs, ‘Notes from the underground: nihilism and The Matrix’, in W. Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 155–65, p. 163. 9 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 85 and 163 respectively. 10 Ibid., p. 84. 11 Ibid., p. 85. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., pp. 85–6. 15 Ibid., p. 95. 16 Ibid., p. 18. 17 Ibid., p. 86. 18 Ibid., p. 163. 19 Ibid., p. 145. 20 Ibid., p. 163. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 163. 23 Ibid., p. 83. 24 Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control’ International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (online). 25 Ibid. 26 Rovira’s argument does not address the ways in which Baudrillard’s ‘subjectless object’ effectively undermines such a model of desire. For a more complex reading of Baudrillard’s model of the subject as object see S. Herbrechter, ‘The posthuman subject in The Matrix’, in M. Diocaretz and S. Herbrechter (eds) The Matrix in Theory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 249–89, pp. 256–8, 284. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 For an example of this approach see Paul Fontana’s theistic reading of The Matrix.

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30 31 32 33 34

35



36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52 53 54

P. Fontana, ‘Finding God in The Matrix’, in G. Yeffeth (ed.) Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (Chichester, West Sussex: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2003), pp. 189–219. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control’. Ibid. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, quotations from pp. 160 and 163 respectively. Ibid., p. 164. The last line forms a paragraph on its own. J. Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. B. Singer (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 15. For further information on seduction as a form of reversibility see C. Constable, Thinking in Images: Film Theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich (London: British Film Institute, 2005), pp. 139–41. Die Hard, J. McTierman, 1988. For an analysis of the significance of Holly’s status as the higher earner see Y. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 61. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 64. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, S. Herek, 1989. My Own Private Idaho, G. van Sant, 1991. J. Clover, The Matrix: BFI Modern Classics (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 21. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 45–6. Clover explicitly states this see The Matrix, p. 22. Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 95. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (online). Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 163. Rovira, ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (online). Ibid. K. Wilber, The philosophical commentary for Matrix Revolutions, scenes 28 and 29, The Ultimate Matrix Collection, DVD boxed set, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2004. Ibid. Clover offers a more general reading of Neo and Trinity as mirror images, arguing that Carrie-Anne Moss is cast for her resemblance to Keanu Reeves. Clover, The Matrix, p. 22. Wilber, the philosophical commentary for Matrix Revolutions, scenes 29 and 30, The Ultimate Matrix Collection. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 85. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid, p. 95.

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I

want to conclude by offering a summary of my methodology and a brief commentary on its utilisation in the preceding analysis of The Matrix Trilogy. This will be followed by an assessment of the differences between my methodology for inter-relating philosophy and film and two other approaches that have been delineated recently by Stephen Mulhall and Thomas Wartenberg.1 While Mulhall’s On Film was originally published in 2002, the second edition contains a new chapter on film as philosophy, which serves to delineate his theoretical position and to counter a number of the objections to the first volume.2 Wartenberg’s book offers an overview of the relations between philosophy and film that augments the analysis of The Matrix discussed in chapter one.3 Importantly, like myself, both these theorists are concerned to address the issue of philosophy on film, rather than offering a philosophy of film that is derived from works by key theorists, such as Deleuze. My analysis of our different positions will address three key issues: intentionality, medium specificity and the role of illustration in philosophy. This will clarify the differences and illuminate points of resemblance between three approaches that are currently emerging from interdisciplinary work in Film-Philosophy. I began this book by demonstrating the prevalence of the binary hierarchies of high/low culture, philosophy/film and word/image in much of the philosophical writing on The Matrix Trilogy. These had the effect of ensuring that the films could not make a contribution to philosophy. My delineation of a new methodology undermines these binary hierarchies, combining aspects of Kamilla Elliott’s work on adaptation and Michèle Le Doeuff ’s writing on Western

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philosophy, in order to show that philosophical and filmic texts are profoundly linked through their reliance on symbolic figuration. Le Doeuff ’s work on the important and unacknowledged conceptual role of imagery within philosophy has also been expanded to provide a means of considering the philosophical implications of the complex figures created by the filmic multitrack. Importantly, the new methodology has facilitated the elucidation of the philosophical project of the films themselves. Chapters three to five trace the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy takes up and transforms Baudrillard’s work, thereby creating its own postmodern position. The trilogy addresses a key question arising from Baudrillard’s work: is there any possibility of revolution or radical change within a pre-programmed system? The films’ positive answer is created through a series of sustained changes to Baudrillard’s figures and concepts. I have shown that the films depart from the singularity that characterises Baudrillard’s conception of the hyperreal and the code, offering a series of multiple, different, hyperreal worlds and codes. The presentation of the genetic code in the second film as a form of computer programming allows the characters to be viewed as individual variables, which have an allotted systemic function but are also capable of change. The possibility of change is created through new forms of inter-relations between variables, epitomised by Trinity’s reformulation of Neo #6. The changed relations between the variables also have the capacity to alter the relations between the different hyperreal worlds, opening up the possibility of positive systemic change, and thus moving beyond Baudrillard’s nihilism. The philosophical position offered by The Matrix Trilogy can be entitled postmodern because it involves a focus on new technologies and a refusal of transcendental categories, such as divinity or rationality. Moreover, though the remnants of humanist values remain, particularly in the presentation of love, they have been fundamentally divorced from a corporeal body or an essential human nature. The focus on forms of inter-relationality other than opposition, its suspension or elimination, constitutes a key move away from Baudrillard. However, the use of well-worn imagery, particularly the presentation of sexual ecstasy as a form of death, means that the inter-dependence valued by the trilogy does not constitute an

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entirely new conception of inter-relationality. The inter-relation between Neo and Trinity is not a new form of co-dependence, such as Irigaray’s models of feminine merging and fluidity, which are expressed through figures of the two that are not subsumable to one.4 The postmodern position offered by The Matrix Trilogy can be usefully compared with Donna Haraway’s affirmative model of the post-human, which uses the figure of the cyborg to trace the philosophical potential of new technologies. Haraway comments that ‘modern medicine is … full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine,’ producing a figure of a postmodern self whose openness to forms of intimate inter-relationality with the machinic provides the means for continual change.5 Openness to change through inter-relationality is also crucial to The Matrix Trilogy, although in the films the issue is the potential relations between the individual characters/programmatic variables, each of which already conjoins elements of the human and the machinic. Famously, Haraway argues in favour of new and positive narratives through which to chart our relations to new technologies,6 adding that such stories are ‘not just literary deconstruction but liminal transformation’ in that they have the capacity fundamentally to affect our future experience of technology.7 The Matrix Trilogy offers an interestingly ambivalent depiction of the relations between the remnants of humanity in Zion and the machine world, showing both the destructiveness of opposition and the possibility of peaceful co-existence between the different programmes. The presentation of the fiery patterns of the machine code is equally ambivalent in that it is both destructive and beautiful. Importantly, for both Haraway and The Matrix Trilogy the loss of the possibility of transcendence is not an occasion for ‘cynicism or faithlessness’.8 Both challenge nihilistic constructions of technological determinism in that the recognition that there is no space beyond the system leads to a reconceptualisation of systematicity, creating new models that are open to change from within. While the philosophical position articulated by the trilogy is postmodern, the model of reading developed and demonstrated across this book is not. The textual analyses cannot be regarded as postmodern or deconstructive in that they do not focus on

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moments of contradiction9 or the dissipation of meaning within the texts. I have departed from Le Doeuff ’s deconstructive analysis of the potentially disruptive role played by imagery in philosophical texts, in order to focus on the ways in which the figurative constitutes a nexus point of key concepts and argument. This focus on congruence and consistency is not an attempt to provide a definitive reading or to return to a textual model of one true meaning. The readings of Simulacra and Simulation explicitly address the shifting roles of the figures across the book, drawing attention to the provisionality of meaning. The tracing of the ways in which such figures are taken up and transformed across The Matrix Trilogy is another fragile delineation of lines of continuity and change. Moreover, this reading is explicitly based on previous, equally precarious, interpretations, which should be clear from the discussion of the problems of reading ‘On Nihilism’ in chapter five. The consideration of the ways in which transformations to the source text go about creating a new and different whole constitutes my particular inflection of Elliott’s figure of adaptation as metamorphosis. I have shown how the trilogy’s take up and alteration of Baudrillard’s figures and concepts serve to create a new postmodern position. Thus, for me, the figure of adaptation as metamorphosis enables the appreciation of a key moment of transformation, which occurs when a series of changes are seen to create and sustain a new whole. For Elliott, the White Queen’s metamorphosis into a sheep knitting the shawl that she has once worn/will wear is a figure of the non-linear, potentially endless, reciprocal relations between two texts.10 Thus Elliott’s own reading emphasises the cyclical aspect of Lewis Carroll’s figure, offering both source and adaptation the opportunity to comment on each other. Tracing the cyclical aspect of adaptation is possible once readings of each text have been delineated. In this way, Baudrillard’s strategies of the object become inextricably intertwined with Neo’s role of Teflon mirror, so ably and aptly instantiated by Keanu Reeves! Likewise, the dominance of oppositional relations (in various modes) within Simulacra and Simulation is called into question by the model of positive inter-relations offered by the films. The Matrix Trilogy, like Haraway’s work, offers a way out of Baudrillard’s technological determinism. This serves to undo the effectiveness of

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particular concepts, such as the code, because the films make us aware of the ways in which they could be conceptualised differently and therefore that their inherently nihilistic trajectory is only one of many possibilities. In this way, we look back towards a Baudrillard reloaded via The Matrix Trilogy, to a source text that can be continually reconstructed by the adaptation. This reciprocal logic plays through more generally in that thinking about adapting philosophy involves the recognition of philosophy as adaptation. Chapter two provides a brief analysis of Baudrillard’s take up of Plato’s cave, showing the ways in which the imagery is reworked. This tracing of the links between Baudrillard’s figurative account of the Forum des Halles and Plato’s cave is the delineation of an ‘imaginary pathway’, Le Doeuff ’s term for the reworking of specific figures across philosophical texts.11 In Baudrillard’s case the recognition of his work as philosophy is reliant on the ability to trace the imaginary pathways constructed by/through key figures. Le Doeuff also recognises that philosophical imagery can be created by drawing on texts outside philosophy. This is exemplified by Baudrillard’s characterisation of the double, which draws on folk-lore, fairy tales and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Importantly, the recognition of the importance and role of figuration within philosophy leads to an understanding of the permeability of the discipline – its openness and indebtedness to other discourses – specifically literature, art and, more recently, film. My model for linking philosophy and film comes out of feminist philosophy, specifically a reworking and expansion of Le Doeuff, and thus draws on a tradition that has been concerned to reconceptualise philosophy itself. Feminist philosophy has called into ­question standard definitions of philosophy as general, abstract, rational and reliant on logical argument. Indeed, numerous theorists would agree that such a definition could not encompass texts by Nietzsche, for example, which clearly do not fulfil the above criteria. In addition, feminist philosophy has effectively challenged the conception of philosophical thought as ahistorical and universal, drawing attention to the historical construction of woman within philosophical texts and her repeated exclusion from the domain of pure reason.12 For me, combining Le Doeuff ’s and Elliott’s focus on the figural leads to the reconceptualisation of philosophy itself as

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the place where thought is figured. Philosophy is to be found wherever figuration forges imaginary pathways, creates new concepts and opens up new perspectives, it can take any form or combination of forms: visual, verbal and/or aural, and occurs everywhere and anywhere. My reconceptualisation of philosophy as thought in figuration is the result of thinking through ways of inter-relating film and ­philosophy. The definition of philosophy and philosophising that Mulhall provides in his second book is also marked by his previous endeavour to place the two in relation. Interestingly, Mulhall ­challenges models of binary opposition that pit the abstract and general nature of philosophy against the concrete particularity of art and/or film.13 Citing Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, he argues that some forms of philosophising focus on the particular: ‘systematically attending to the particular ways in which concepts forge and alter their relations to other concepts from context to context of their application’.14 Mulhall is also concerned to broaden the definition of philosophy as the formulation of logical arguments, drawing on aesthetics and ethics to set out modes of reasoning that rise to ‘the challenge of making sense of human existence.’15 Here the success of an argument is not to be measured in terms of accuracy/ inaccuracy, or the crushing of the opposition in debate, but rather in ‘encouraging one’s interlocutor … to look at everything differently’.16 It is interesting that Mulhall, Wartenberg and myself all draw on an account of philosophising as a perspectival shift, a model that originates with Nietzsche. It cannot be accidental that in writing on film and philosophy, all of us find a (greater or lesser) role for this highly visual analogy for the process of thinking again.17 However, Mulhall’s main model of philosophising differs from my own in that he borrows from Heidegger, presenting philosophy as a form of reflective and reflexive questioning that illuminates the fundamental conditions of existence.18 While this provides the means to link the everyday and the philosophical in that the ‘natural, inherent reflectiveness of human life-forms’ is a template for ‘the inveterate reflectiveness of philosophy’, Mulhall’s model privileges the role of reflection and therefore of consciousness.19 Like great literature,20 films are said to ‘embody sustained reflection on the part of those who

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fashioned them’ and thus to have the same capacity to acknowledge and interrogate their ‘own conditions of possibility’.21 Mulhall’s definition of philosophy as sustained and serious reflection requires a subject to do the reflecting and thus explicitly raises the issue of intentionality. He follows through this line of argument logically, privileging the role of the director. While the second edition makes the link explicit, this aspect of Mulhall’s first book, On Film, had already drawn criticism within Film Studies, suggesting that he was replicating some of the more problematic tenets of Auteurism,22 specifically the postulation of a single ­organising mind that is responsible for the film’s unique depiction of the world. Mulhall’s response, the contention that authorship is merely a means of differentiating between texts, takes the form of citing Cavell: ‘As long as a reference to a director by name suggests differences between the films associated with that name and one associated with other names, the reference is … intellectually grounded.’23 Unfortunately, the quote does not address the issue at stake. If, as Mulhall has argued, the films’ only link to philosophy is established through the postulation of a reflective mind responsible for its creation, this minimal notion of authorship is not sufficient. Importantly, the attribution of philosophical meaning to the film text is reliant on the postulation of authorial intention: the director as philosopher. However, the equation of textual meaning with intentionality has been challenged within analytic and continental philosophy and, more obliquely, by cultural analyses of specific audiences and their modes of reading in Film Studies.24 While Wartenberg connects philosophy and film in different ways from Mulhall, his model also raises the issue of intentionality. Wartenberg provides a more traditional definition of philosophy as logical, reasoned argument and the careful exposition of such arguments, allocating two sets of corresponding roles to film.25 Firstly, films are said to conduct particular types of philosophical argument, specifically the thought experiment (which I discussed in chapter one) and the counterexample.26 Secondly, they can offer illustrations of arguments, functioning as a logical exposition of a philosophical position and occasionally augmenting it.27 Thus, for Wartenberg, there are two key ways in which films may be said to be ‘“doing philosophy”’, a phrase he glosses as follows: ‘that a film philosophizes … is really a

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shorthand expression for stating that the film’s makers are the ones who are actually doing philosophy in/on/through films.’28 The problems arising through the adoption of the criterion of intentionality become clear in Wartenberg’s detailed analysis of The Third Man as an illustration of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Having argued that the film draws on, systematises and even augments aspects of the philosopher’s work,29 Wartenberg adds: ‘[t]he ­parallels to Aristotle’s discussion of friendship … were so striking … that I could not help believing that the filmmakers had intended them.’30 Unfortunately, there is no way of confirming this, given the death of Carol Reed in 1976, and more importantly, the attempt to infer intention from the film text is not a legitimate line of argument because any text will mean more than its author intends. However, it is clear from previous passages that Wartenberg takes up the criterion of intention in order to evade the charge of imposing an unwarranted philosophical meaning upon an ­unsuspecting film text.31 Responding to ‘the imposition objection’ results in the definition of a ‘plausible’ philosophical reading as one that posits ‘a meaning … the filmmaker(s) could have intended’.32 The response is interesting because intentionality becomes the criterion for distinguishing between plausible and implausible meanings, suggesting that the imposition objection tacitly relies on a conception of ‘warranted readings’ that are congruent with authorial intention. Thus, Wartenberg’s reading of The Third Man is an imposition unless it is what the author thought or could have thought. It should be noted that the necessity of delineating the second option nicely demonstrates the way in which intentionality is apt to become an ever-receding horizon. It is interesting that both Mulhall and Wartenberg resort to the reassertion of the problematic criterion of intentionality in order to prove the philosophical credentials of the film text. Thus, for Mulhall, a film’s presentation of self-conscious, reflexive moments, which draw attention to its status as a film, must be analysed in terms of directorial intention.33 Equally for Wartenberg it is not enough that the film text offers argumentation and exposition that draws on themes, narratives and debates present in philosophical texts. Both theorists have to posit the existence of the philosopher behind the text, in order for the text to be philosophical or to ‘do philosophy’.34

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However, this is to be misled by the structures of grammar into postulating a doer behind the deed.35 It is really not necessary to posit the existence of a single, conscious, reflective mind responsible for every feature of the film text; it is the presence of narratives, themes, debates and figures taken up from philosophy that make the film text philosophical. Thus, on my model of philosophy as thought in figuration, the film text, philosophical text and the interpretation are all doing philosophy. The model of meaning as intention does not hold within philosophy because texts cannot be held to a simple, single interpretation, they always mean more than their author/s know. Thus, it is not legitimate for Baudrillard to accuse The Matrix Trilogy of misrepresenting his work because the films fail to convey his understanding of his position. In the same way, should the Wachowski brothers ever respond to this book, saying that the reading of the trilogy is not what they intended, it would be a point of interest but it would not undermine the validity of the philosophical reading. The criterion for judging any philosophical reading as plausible or implausible has to involve the assessment of the quality of the interpretation: the attention to textual detail, and the careful demonstration of congruences and differences between the philosophical and film texts. I would also add that the readings should delineate the diverse ways in which philosophical and filmic texts construct their figures. Rather than simply privileging the dialogue as the closest analogue to the written word, successful philosophical analyses of film texts have to pay attention to the verbal, visual and aural dimensions of filmic figuration. In arguing that we need to focus on the diverse ways in which figuration is constructed across different types of texts, I am not advocating a return to medium specificity. Such arguments aim to delineate the unique and essential qualities of each specific medium and these are typically derived from their technological features. The results usually take an oppositional form, pitting the written word against the visual image, which, as Elliott demonstrates, makes it quite impossible to see lines of continuity across different types of texts.36 Both Mulhall and Wartenberg address a specific formulation of an argument for medium specificity, which poses the problem of whether film can offer a particular, cinematic mode

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of doing philosophy.37 If film’s presentation of philosophy is ‘specifically cinematic’,38 then the issue is whether this can be translated back into the verbal (written/spoken) discourses of philosophy. There are two possible outcomes: if translation is impossible, then film is not doing philosophy. If translation is possible then film is not offering a specifically cinematic presentation of philosophy. Interestingly, Mulhall can be seen to avail himself of the second option, suggesting that there are no essentially cinematic ways in which film does philosophy. This forms the justification of his privileging ‘the expressive resources’ that pertain to both literature and cinema in his film readings, such as ‘dialogue, character development and plot’.39 However, it is quite possible to acknowledge diversity and differences between literary, philosophical and filmic texts without having to resort to identifying a spurious series of mutually exclusive features as required by arguments for medium specificity. It is disappointing that Mulhall’s expressed interest in the philosophy of particularity does not lead him to a more precise formulation of the possible significance of particular features of filmic signification. As demonstrated in chapter one, Wartenberg evades some of the problems of medium specificity by offering a form of comparability theory in which specific formulations of argument, in that case the counter example, are able to bridge the gulf between the two mediums of philosophy and film. However, in Thinking on Screen, Wartenberg offers another role to film, that of illustrating philosophy, paralleling the work of illustration with philosophical commentary, which takes the form of the exegesis of key texts.40 This line of argument is interesting because it involves challenging a key assumption about the role of illustration in philosophy highlighted by Le Doeuff, namely, that it is merely a translation or study aid that adds nothing to the philosophical project itself.41 Indeed, Wartenberg is keen to argue that much of the contemporary work within philosophy takes the form of illustration/exegesis and that therefore this must be regarded as a legitimate form of doing philosophy.42 He also endeavours to broaden the role of illustration, arguing that filmic illustrations can augment previously unexplored aspects of a philosophical system.43 This means that illustration is presented as another mode of comparability between philosophy

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and film. However, analysing film’s presentation of illustration is also crucial to Wartenberg’s continuing delineation of the distinctive qualities of philosophy screened and thus plays an important role in establishing and reworking some key differences between philosophy and film.44 Wartenberg begins his book by arguing that the philosophical role open to many fiction films is that of illustrating philosophy. Importantly, the language in which he describes and defines the role requires further consideration. Having provided an analysis of the ways in which The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ‘presents its own version of Nietzsche’s criticism of Hegel’s conception of history’,45 he concludes: ‘many fiction films embody philosophical ideas … by providing vivid examples that make it clear what the stakes are in an otherwise quite abstract philosophical debate.’46 The language of embodiment presents film as a materialisation of philosophical abstraction. Earlier in the analysis he comments ‘film is able to give philosophical concepts and ideas a human garb that allows their consequences to be perceived more clearly.’47 Here materialisation takes the form of making manifest the implications of philosophical abstractions. The corporeal language is important because tracing the logical implications of ideas/concepts is not presented as another form of thinking; it is merely the physical manifestation of what is, by implication, always already contained within the prior abstractions. It is to be noted that the introduction of film’s role of material illustration marks a return to some familiar binary hierarchies, pitting the embodied materiality of film against the general abstraction of the word. Wartenberg’s equation of visualisation and materialisation means that his model of philosophy screened greatly resembles Elliott’s conception of the ‘incarnational doctrine of adaptation’ in which the film is viewed as the literary word made flesh.48 Both theorists can therefore be said to face the same problem, namely, how to provide an account of materiality that does not simply fall back into traditional binary hierarchies in which the abstract, transcendent Word is placed above the physicality of human flesh. Within this context, Wartenberg’s deployment of the figure of concretisation in his discussion of the filmic illustration is unfortunate. This can be seen in comments such as: Modern Times ‘provides its viewers

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with concrete illustrations of Marx’s abstract claims, illustrations that show the audience the human significance of those abstractions.’49 Concretisation is not an appropriate term for summarising the ways in which films might express the logical consequences and implications of ideas/concepts. The inert, slab-like quality of concrete does not provide the imagistic means to think about materiality in ways that could possibly address the filmic image’s status as a sophisticated construction. It is unsurprising that the negative aspects of the vocabulary of materialisation can often be linked to other discourses in which the image is invariably a simplification of the word – the word made literal. In this way, the reassertion of the division between abstract word and material flesh covertly ushers in the opposition between the symbolic and the literal. This elision of the material and the literal can be seen at the beginning of Wartenberg’s analysis of Modern Times. He argues that the film acts as an illustration of Marx’s theories of the exploitation and alienation of the workforce, which involves analysing a specific figure from the theorist’s writings: ‘The machine accommodates itself to man’s weakness, in order to turn weak man into a machine.’50 Wartenberg comments that Marx’s use of metaphor means he is making a ‘poetic rather than … a literal claim … about the conditions of the working class.’51 He then asks: ‘What would it mean … for a person to quite literally become a machine?’52 The question forms a preface to the film reading, clearly suggesting that the film offers a literalisation of the metaphor. Wartenberg adds: ‘Modern Times involves a complete visualization of Marx’s metaphor, one that makes it more concrete.’53 The juxtaposition of the comment and the question equates the film’s concretisation of Marx with the literalisation of the written word. Fortunately, Wartenberg’s reading of Modern Times focuses on ‘the film’s depiction of human mechanization’ a description that allows him to acknowledge and address the constructed nature of the filmic text.54 He focuses on the scenes in which Chaplin continues to perform the repeated action of tightening bolts although he is no longer on the assembly line, showing the protagonist’s mechanisation through his continual attempts to tighten inappropriate round objects (noses, buttons, etc). Wartenberg notes that the protagonist’s mechanisation is also expressed through pace, which

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is ‘determined by the assembly line and the demands of his boss’.55 The issue could also be explored in terms of the timing of Chaplin’s performance: the dance-like flourishes with which he performs the gestures of the assembly line and their immaculate timing with the extra-diegetic musical accompaniment, suggest a battle between the creative individual and malfunctioning machine. Wartenberg also draws attention to the complexity of the filmic figures in Modern Times. He comments on the famous dissolve between the sheep being herded up a chute to the slaughterhouse and the workers going to the factory, suggesting that ‘the workers are like the sheep … they too face an ignominious end.’56 Indeed, this reading of the figure prefaces the general observation that ‘film’s visual nature does not preclude it from being able to express a thought, to “think”. The visual and the cognitive are not opposites, although many theorists have taken them to be.’57 Unfortunately, the textual details and concomitant observations do not have any impact on the meta-critical vocabulary that Wartenberg uses to summarise his approach. The continual deployment of terms such as materialisation and concretisation results in the re-emergence of the very binary hierarchies that he is concerned to challenge. The meta-critical analyses of the role of film as illustration lead up to the final attribution of a single, key feature of ­philosophy screened. ‘If there is anything unique about film as a philo­ sophical medium … it is the immediacy with which its temporally ­ developing images confront us with a counterfeit of our everyday experience of the world.’58 The delineation of immediacy as the key characteristic recalls the emphasis on film as a vivid visualisation of philosophy. Wartenberg references his reading of The Matrix as a thought ­experiment, arguing that all philosophical attempts to offer this type of argument, including Descartes’ own version, ‘pale in the face of a film.’59 The ‘philosophical punch’ of the visual image, its vividness and immediacy, has the power to outshine the word.60 It is at this point that Wartenberg is closest to Elliott’s argument in favour of the incarnational doctrine of adaptation, in which the materiality of the filmic image has the power to expose the abstract generality of the word as ‘illusive and empty’.61 However, Wartenberg’s final valorisation of the language of immediacy is problematic. It does not seem adequately to convey

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his sense of film’s role as an illustration of the logical implications of particular philosophical arguments and concepts. Even if the point is that these can be grasped more readily in filmic form, the audience can only come to an appreciation of such implications through a process of reading that brings together all the figurative aspects of the film text: mise-en-scène, costume, performance, lighting, music, dialogue, sound, editing and cinematography. Indeed, it would seem that the swiftness with which we can grasp the significance of filmic figures leads to an underestimation of the work required to do so, what Robert Stam ably describes as ‘intense perceptual and conceptual labor – the work of iconic designation, visual deciphering, narrative inference and construction – inherent in [viewing] film.’62 It might be argued that the problems of Wartenberg’s model could be solved by replacing his meta-critical vocabulary of materialisation, concretisation and immediacy with Elliott’s conception of ‘realisation’. One of the advantages of this term is that it conveys both the transition from the written word to a material form and an increased awareness of the implications of the written word. However, positioning film as the realisation/fulfilment of the word creates a model that can only focus on the moments when an adaptation follows the source material or develops in ways deemed to be congruent with its source. The limitations of the model are displayed by Wartenberg who is able to trace the ways in which films instantiate specific philosophical systems and even, on occasion, augment them,63 but who does not address the ways in which films might take up and change their philosophical sources. Indeed, the demonstration of film’s role as a counter-example, which might seem to develop in opposition to a particular source, actually takes the form of paralleling the film with a previous philosophical counter-example to the theoretical system under discussion, in this case utilitarianism.64 Importantly, the model of materialisation/realisation cannot provide the means to trace the ways in which films take up and adapt their philosophical sources, thereby creating their own philosophical positions. Fundamentally, the conception of film as a materialisation/realisation of a written source still relies on a tacit opposition between the specificity of the filmic image and the abstract generality of the

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word. While Wartenberg and Elliott attempt to invert the hierarchy of image versus word, privileging the immediacy and fullness of the material image respectively, they do not challenge the logic of ­opposition on which it is based. The inability to overturn key binary hierarchies within this mode of thinking is, presumably, one of Elliott’s reasons for abandoning this line of argument and focusing instead on the figurative properties of written and filmic texts. Focusing on the figural involves the recognition that vividness, immediacy and fullness are not the exclusive properties of visual images. These qualities can be attributed to any appropriate figure in any medium. We need to develop an appreciation of the liveliness of philosophical figures, for example, Descartes’ evil genius hypothesis as both a thought experiment and an unfolding drama complete with charismatic villain. Baudrillard’s figures are extra­ ordinarily vivid: the image of the hyperreal as a mirror folding over on itself, conveying its absolute inescapability,65 or the personification of the Remainder, who relentlessly chases after the slash of opposition that it has obliterated.66 The second figure both enlivens an abstract point and summarises two lines of argument: the end of opposition within the hyperreal and the futility of all attempts to reintroduce it. I would agree with Wartenberg that there is still much to be done on the diversity of roles played by illustrations, and indeed the figural more generally, within philosophy.67 Finally, I would add that focusing on the figural enables an appreciation of the liveliness of philosophical texts, which are so much more than logic and argument. Thus the conception of thought as figuration enables us to see both the vividness and drama of philo­ sophy and the conceptual dimensions of narrative fiction films. In this book, my main aim has been to explore the latter possibility, to open up new ways of appreciating the philosophical dimensions of film. This has involved tracing The Matrix Trilogy’s take up and transformation of Baudrillard’s work in the creation of its own postmodern position. Tracing the trajectories of thought in figuration redefines philosophy as a precarious process that is always reliant on interpretation and therefore always open to reinterpretation. Thus, this cannot be the last word on Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy; indeed, I hope it constitutes the beginning of a new strand of debates within adaptation theory and Film-Philosophy.

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Notes 1 S. Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), T. ­Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 2 See chapter five, Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.), pp. 129–55. 3 Chapter four is a rewrite of the article on The Matrix, Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, pp. 55–75. 4 L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 233–5. 5 D. Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, in D. Haraway Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 150. 6 Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, pp. 176–7. 7 Ibid., p. 177. 8 Ibid., p. 153. 9 Linda Hutcheon argues that the elucidation of paradox is central to postmodern readings. See L. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 17, 23. 10 K. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 230. 11 M. Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. C. Gordon (London: Athlone Press, 1989), p. 165. 12 C. Constable, Thinking in Images: Film Theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich (London: British Film Institute, 2005), pp. 37–43. 13 Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.), pp. 142–3. 14 Ibid., p. 143. 15 Ibid., p. 139. 16 Ibid., p. 140. 17 Wartenberg uses the concept of the perspectival shift in his discussion of clashes and changes of moral perspective in The Third Man, see Thinking on Screen, pp. 111–12, 114. I have analysed the figure of the perspectival shift in relation to the process of thinking again in Constable, Thinking in Images, pp. 103–7. 18 Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.), pp. 143–4. 19 Ibid., p. 144. 20 Ibid., p. 140. 21 Ibid., p. 131, my italics. 22 Ibid., pp. 147, 263 fn. 14. 23 S. Cavell, Contesting Tears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) pp. 8–9 cited in Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.), p. 148. 24 See W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and M. C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in A. Neill and A. Ridley (eds) The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern (McGrawHill: Boston, Massachusetts, 1996), pp. 374–84; J. Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 127–8; R. Dyer, The Culture of Queers (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 25 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, pp. 9, 30.

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Conclusion  165 26 Ibid., pp. 24, 76, 82–3. 27 Wartenberg’s line of argument takes issue with Falzon’s and Mulhall’s positioning of illustration outside philosophy, see Thinking on Screen, pp. 32–8, 44. 28 Ibid., p. 12. 29 Ibid., pp. 94, 102, 104, 116. 30 Ibid., p. 139. 31 Ibid., pp. 8–9, 24–6. 32 Ibid., p. 26. 33 See, for example, Mulhall’s reading of the presentation of the Voight-Kampff machine in Blade Runner, On Film (2nd ed.), pp. 43–4, 133–4. 34 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, p. 12. 35 F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 45. 36 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 195. 37 P. Livingstone, ‘Theses on cinema as philosophy’, in T. Wartenberg and M. Smith (eds) Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 11–8. This argument is taken up in Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.), p. 149; and ­Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, p. 13. 38 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, p. 12. 39 Mulhall, On Film (2nd ed.), p. 150. 40 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, p. 44. 41 M. Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, p. 7. 42 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, pp. 44, 53. 43 Ibid., pp. 108, 116. 44 Ibid., pp. 135, 137. 45 Ibid., p. 5. 46 Ibid., p. 8, my italics. 47 Ibid., p. 5, my italics. 48 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, pp. 161–172. 49 Wartenberg, Thinking On Screen, p. 53. 50 K. Marx, Early Writings (New York: Random House, 1975) p. 360, cited in Wartenberg, Thinking On Screen, p. 50. 51 Wartenberg, Thinking On Screen, p. 50. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., p. 51. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 45. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., p. 137, my italics. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 167. 62 R. Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, in R. Stam and A.

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63 64 65 66 67

Raengo (eds) Literature and Film: a Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 1–52, p. 7. Wartenberg, Thinking On Screen, pp. 51, 108, 116. Ibid., pp. 84–5, 91. J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 18. Ibid., p. 145. Wartenberg, Thinking On Screen, p. 38.

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Bibliography  171 Irwin, W. ‘Introduction: meditations on The Matrix’, in Irwin, W. (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 1–2. Irwin, W. (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002). Kilbourn, R. J. A. ‘Re-writing “reality”: reading The Matrix’, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 9:2 (2000), pp. 43–54. Knight, D. and McKnight, G. ‘Real genre and virtual philosophy’, in Irwin, W (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 188–201. Korsmeyer, C. ‘Seeing, believing, touching, truth’, in W. Irwin (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 41–52. Kuhn, A. (ed.) Alien Zone (London: Verso, 1990). Kuhn, A. (ed.) Alien Zone II (London: Verso, 1999). Lamm, S. (ed.) The Art of The Matrix (London: Titan Books and WB Publishing, 2000). Lavery, D. ‘From cinespace to cyberspace: Zionists and agents, realists and gamers in The Matrix and eXistenZ’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 28:4 (2001), pp. 150–7. Lawrence, M. Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind The Matrix Trilogy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Le Doeuff, M. ‘Long hair, short ideas’, in Le Doeuff, M. The Philo­ sophical Imaginary, trans. C. Gordon (London: Athlone Press, 1989), pp. 100–28. Le Doeuff, M. ‘Preface: the shameful face of philosophy’, in Le Doeuff, M. The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. C. Gordon (London: Athlone Press, 1989). Litch, M. Philosophy Through Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). Livingstone, P. ‘Theses on cinema as philosophy’, in Wartenberg, T. and Smith, M (eds) Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 11–18. Lutzka, S. ‘Simulacra, simulation and The Matrix’, in Diocaretz, M. and Herbrechter, S. (eds) The Matrix in Theory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 113–29. Marinoff, L. ‘The Matrix and Plato’s cave: why the sequels failed’, in Irwin, W. (ed.) More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2005), pp. 3–11.

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172  Bibliography Marx, K. Early Writings (New York: Random House, 1975). McFarlane, B. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Merrin, W. ‘“Did you ever eat tasty wheat?”: Baudrillard and The Matrix’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, www.Nottingham.ac.uk/ film/journal/articlesdid-you-ever-eat.htm (accessed 12/3/07). Merrin, W. Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction (Cam­­ bridge: Polity Press, 2005). Messier, V. ‘Baudrillard in The Matrix: the hyperreal, Hollywood and a case for misused references’, www.thefilmjournal.com/issue13/ thematrix.html (accessed on 12/3/07). Metz, C. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. C. Britton, A. Williams, B. Brewster and A. Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). Metz, C. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: An Imaginary Signifier, trans. C. Britton, A. Williams, B. Brewster and A. Guzzetti (London: Macmillan Press, 1982). Milutus, J. ‘Making the world safe for fashionable philosophy!’, www. ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=390 (accessed 12/03/07). Mulhall, S. On Film (London: Routledge, 2002). Mulhall, S. On Film (2nd ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Nakamura, L. ‘The multiplication of difference in post-millennial cyberpunk film: the visual culture of race in The Matrix Trilogy’, in Gillis, S. (ed.) The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 126–37. Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.  J.  Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). Plato, The Republic, ed. and trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1987). Romney, J. ‘Everywhere and nowhere’, Sight and Sound, 13:7 (2003), pp. 24–7. Rovira, J. ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy’, http://artisanitorium.thehydden.com/nonfiction/ film/matrix.htm (accessed 12/12/2003). Rovira, J. ‘Subverting the mechanisms of control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy, and the future of religion’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2:2 (2005), on-line article. www.ubishops.ca/ BaudrillardStudies/vol2_2/rovira.htm (accessed 12/03/07).

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Bibliography  173 Schick, T. ‘Fate, freedom, and foreknowledge’, in Irwin, W. (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 87–98. Seay, C. and Garrett, G. The Gospel Reloaded: Exploring Spirituality and Faith in The Matrix (Colorado Springs: Pinon Press, 2003). Simpkins, R. ‘Visualizing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation through The Matrix’, Notes on Contemporary Literature, 30:4 (2000), pp. 6–9. Spelling, I. ‘Weaving a spell: interview with Hugo Weaving’, Fangoria, 222 (2003), pp. 34–7. Stam, R. ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’, in Stam, R. and Raengo, A. (eds) Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 1–52. Stratton, J. ‘So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999: looking forward to The Matrix’, in Diocaretz, M. and Herbrechter, S. (eds) The Matrix in Theory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 27–52. Tasker, Y. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Vigo, P. and Murray, V. ‘The Matrix exploded’, Metro, 138 (2003), pp. 168–72. Wachowski, L. and A. ‘The Matrix screenplay’, in Lamm, S. (ed.) The Art of The Matrix (London: Titan Books and WB Publishing, 2000), pp. 271–39. Wartenberg, T. ‘Philosophy screened: experiencing The Matrix’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 27 (2003), pp. 139–52. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Weberman, D. ‘The Matrix: simulation and the postmodern age’, in Irwin, W. (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 225–39. Wilber, K. ‘The philosophical commentary for Matrix Revolutions, scenes 28 to 30’, in The Ultimate Matrix Collection, DVD boxed set, Warner Bros Entertainment Inc., 2004. Wimsatt, Jr., W.K. and Beardsley, M.C. ‘The intentional fallacy’, in Neill, A. and Ridley, A. (eds) The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern (Boston, Massachusetts: McGraw Hill, 1996), pp. 374–84. Woolf, V. ‘The cinema’, in Collected Essays: volume 2 (London: Hogarth, 1966).

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174  Bibliography Yeffeth, G. (ed.) Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2003). Žižek, S. ‘The Matrix: or the two sides of perversion’, in Irwin, W. (ed.) The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), pp. 240–66. Žižek, S. ‘Reloaded revolutions’, in Irwin, W. (ed.) More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2005), pp. 198–208. Zynda, L. ‘Was Cypher right? part two: the nature of reality and why it matters’, in Yeffeth, G. (ed.) Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2003), pp. 43–55.

Films Alien, 1979. R. Scott. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 1989. S. Herek. Die Hard, 1988. J. McTierman. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962. J. Ford. The Matrix Reloaded, 2003. A. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. The Matrix Revolutions, 2003. A. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. The Matrix, 1999. A. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. Modern Times, 1936. C. Chaplin. My Own Private Idaho, 1991. G. van Sant. The Terminator, 1984. J. Cameron. Total Recall, 1990. P. Verhoeven.

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Index

Note: ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page adaptation as incarnation 44–5, 65n.29, 87, 159–63 as metamorphosis 7, 56–7, 61, 64, 91, 152 comparability theory 29–30, 158 see also dichotomies, fidelity debate, medium specificity Agent Smith 76–8, 94n.57, 102–5, 134n.29, 138–44, 147n.8 see also cancer, inter-relations Alien 89 Andersen, H. C. 70 Bassham, G. 13 Beja, M. 26 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure 136 Bluestone, G. 19, 36 Bordwell, D. 9n.14 Burke, E. 44 Callus, I. 19 cancer 101–5, 120–1 see also Agent Smith Cardwell, S. 11–12, 42–3 Carroll, L. 55, 79, 152 Cavell, S. 155

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Clarke, J. 48n.79 cloning 96, 99–102, 105, 109, 118, 121 Clover, J. 137 code 7, 96–125, 127, 130, 138–40 see also multiple Constable, C. 8, 9n.17, 41, 60, 94n.65, 95n.79, 124n.1, 147n.2, 148n.34, 154, 164n.12 Danahay, M. 38n.79, 81, 93n.51 deconstruction 55–6, 58, 60, 64 reading strategies of 59–61, 151–2 see also reading Denzin, N. 63 Derrida, J. 65n.22 Descartes, R. 11, 15, 24–5, 30–4, 161, 163 determinism 108–18, 120–3, 130, 138, 140–1, 151–2 Detmer, D. 19–20 dichotomies conceptual/perceptual 46, 48–9, 65–6n.42, 82 symbolic/literal 6, 46–7, 51, 54–5, 57, 87, 160 word/image 7, 41, 46–7, 49, 57–8, 82, 149

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176  Index Die Hard 134–5 differential repetition 57, 122–3, 134, 136, 138, 144–5, 146 double 69–70, 72, 79, 104, 153 as other 70, 73 as sign of death 69–70, 73, 100 precession of simulacra 69, 86, 105–6 relation to opposition 70, 72–4, 79, 91, 99–100, 105–6, 129 see also twins During, E. 3, 20, 23 Dyer, R. 164n.24 Elliott, K. 6–7, 41, 42, 44–50, 52–8, 61, 64, 77n.92, 149, 152–3, 157, 159, 161–3 Enlightenment 131–4, 142, 146 Enright, D. J. 43 Erion, G. 14, 36n.14 Falzon, C. 6, 10, 28, 32–4, 94n.54, 165n.27 Felluga, D. 16, 22, 85, 94n.60 fidelity debate 5, 6, 10–12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 23–4, 26–8, 34–5, 37n.51, 41, 91 Fishburne, L. performance style 82–4, 116 see also Morpheus Fontana, P. 147n.29 Freeland, C. 38n.77 Freud, S. 51, 101 Gilloch, G. 92n.8 Gopnik, A. 84 Gordon, A. 8n.3, 9n.10, 16, 17–20, 68n.138, 79, 94n.53, 94n.62 Grau, C. 21, 22 Grosz, E. 93n.31 Hanley, R. 37n.37, 63, 93n.36

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Haraway, D. 8, 151, 152 Herbrechter, S. 3, 4, 38n.84, 39n.98, 124n.29, 147n.26 Hibbs, T. S. 147n.8 Hutcheon, L. 164n.9 hyperreal 17–18, 20, 22, 25–6, 69–70, 81, 86–9, 99, 107, 127 four phases of the image 16–18, 20, 22–3, 25 role of cinema 72–3 role of television 74, 76, 78, 101, 108 space of entrapment 76–9, 118, 163 space of undead 70, 72–3, 74, 101, 106–8, 123 see also multiple intentionality 155–7 inter-relations 122–3, 128, 144–6, 150–2 see also Agent Smith, love, Trinity Irigaray, L. 68n.127, 151 Irwin, W. 11, 20, 38n.70, 82 Kilbourn, R. 18, 80–1, 87, 94n.55 Knight, D. 19 Korsmeyer, C. 89 Lavery, D. 18, 20 Lawrence, M. 14 Le Doeuff, M. 6, 41–2, 58–62, 149–50, 152–3, 158 Litch, M. 15, 94n.55 Livingstone, P. 165n.37 love, 122, 135–6, 146, 150 see also inter-relations, Trinity Lutzka, S. 18, 94n.71 McFarlane, B. 26–7, 29–30, 35, 46, 53 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The 159

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Index  177 Marinoff, L. 11, 38n.70 Marx, K. 160 medium specificity 28–9, 40n.115, 149, 157–8 Merrin, W. 2, 23–4, 32, 81, 90, 93n.27 Messier, V. 90–1, 95n.84 Metz, C. 50–5 Milutus, J. 85 Modern Times 52, 159–61 Morpheus 82–9, 110, 113, 115–17, 120, 128, 134 as voice of truth 82–3, 88–90 see also Fishburne, L. Mulhall, S. 8, 149, 154–8 multiple codes 97–9, 123, 134, 145, 150 hyperreal worlds 81–2, 87–9, 90–2, 99, 103, 111, 128, 145–6, 150 see also code, hyperreal My Own Private Idaho 136

Reeves, K. star persona 136–7 feminisation of 137–8 religious imagery 112–13, 132–4, 142–3, 146 see also Rovira, J., Wilber, K. reversal 25, 62, 70–1, 75–6, 122, 128, 130, 133, 136, 139, 141–3, 146 Romney, J. 21, 117 Rovira, J. 23–4, 27–8, 35, 94n.57, 127, 131–4, 141–3 screenplay 83, 87 seduction 26, 133, 137 Simpkins, R. 16 Stam, R. 4, 42, 44–5, 162 Stratton, J. 8n.3, 8n.5 structuralism 41, 46–50, 52, 54–5, 58, 66n.52 see also Metz C.

object strategies 25, 128–30, 136, 143, 146, 152

Tasker, Y. 148n.35 Terminator, The 86, 88 Total Recall 16, 94n.54 Trinity 75–7, 108, 110–12, 115, 117, 121–2, 135–6, 139, 141–2, 144, 146, 148n.50, 151 see also inter-relations, love twins 105–8

philosophy definitions of perspectivalism 154 thought in figuration 153–4 traditional 2–4, 28–9, 155 Plato 11, 13, 42–5, 61–2, 72, 144, 153

Wartenberg, T. 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 28–34, 149, 154–63 Weberman, D. 63 Wilber, K. 14, 84, 142 Woolf, V. 44, 47, 54

reading Baudrillard 62–4, 127–8, 132–3 construction of true meaning 26–7 new methodology of 8, 35, 63, 151–2, 162

Yeffeth, G. 16

Nakamura, L. 125n.30 Nietzsche, F. 57, 153–4, 159 nihilism 7, 127–8, 132–3, 142, 145–6, 150

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Žižek, S. 20, 22, 32, 137

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