Rebuilding a shattered reality with Matrix Resurrections – Francesco Boille

Does the new become old, or has it just become aware that in order to be projected towards the future, one must always reinvent oneself? Perhaps because we are intrinsically mutants in an increasingly unstable everyday life, which moreover becomes in some way multiverse, but also because in reinventing ourselves we must know how to accept the most natural things, such as aging and the need for love in its purest and absolute. And, from there, gather the fragments. Even if it seems like a déjà vu. Fragments of reality or illusion of reality, which becomes a “goal”, to be understood in all possible and imaginable senses. Welcome to the door of Matrix Resurrections, from 1 January in cinemas.

It is the fourth, highly anticipated chapter of a saga that marked an era like no other, located on a ridge where on one side a world that ended and on the other one that, whether we like it or not, was starting radically new. Let’s not forget: the first chapter – the fil-matrix of the new myth of the matrix – came out in 1999, when a century and a millennium were both about to end.

It was a very innovative film – in its great strengths as well as its limits, intimately linked together – made by two young filmmaking brothers, Larry and Andy Wachowski. Meanwhile, the two have become women and are now called Lana and Lilly Wachowski. But it was Lana who returned, alone, to the places – which no longer can be non-places – where this great postmodern yet avant-garde cycle was built, which has now become (almost) an old myth. It also helped her to relaunch her life after mourning the death of her parents, according to what she said. And in fact, behind this return there seems to be a desire for love and gratitude towards those who generated it, beyond the pressures of production, widely cited with no little subversive irony in the film. And among those who generated it, there also seems to be cinema itself understood as a physical place, which in the meantime has also become uncertain, as evidenced by the touching statements of the director on the matter.

A kaleidoscope of metaphors
In these over twenty years the cause of the LGBT + community, at least in democratic countries and particularly in the United States, has made important steps forward, and this has prompted, or in any case helped, first Larry and then Andy in the choice to change sex. This aspect has an important connection with Matrix Resurrections, if it is true, as the authors (indeed “conceivers”) affirm, that the saga is a transgender metaphor. But this metaphor is actually a kaleidoscope that contains many others, and which in this new chapter find their rereading or reset, their conceptual revision. The series of Matrix – the first, the two sequels of 2003 and the latter – is basically a cinema concept, a cerebral cinema which, in its infinite game of mirrors, is also readable as a journey or a mental paranoia, or as the “real” prison created by a perverse mind. The eternal one of power that oppresses and becomes more and more refined and subtle.

And so the Wachowskis are sophisticated creators of aseptically crafted narrative ideas. Self Matrix it is the realm of eternal replication and homologation as a result of collective anesthesia willed by power – the God from the machine in a broad sense, which governs the city of machines – it is natural that this finds its reflection in the visual form of the film.

The conceptual kaleidoscope of Matrix remains unique in the cinema of the last decades and this also applies to Matrix Resurrections. It is an incredible melting pot of fundamental themes explicitly represented but intertwined in a vertiginous way, as if they were the many faces (mirrors) of a single problem: everything is illusion.

We list some of them. In a (self) ironic way, art that has become fake, falsified, finds its paradigm in the blockbuster film show; the realization that now everything is a video game that anesthetizes us and makes us apathetic, preventing us from reacting together with the great game of “crypto-fascism”, to put it in the film, inherent in current democracies; the consequent quotation from Karl Marx (“all the great facts and great characters of universal history present themselves, so to speak, twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce”); psychoanalysis used upside down, that is, not as a human science that wanted to be liberating but as an instrument subservient to the invasive and subliminal processes of manipulation of the unconscious by the ideology of marketing (the character of the analyst); the corporeality of the machine and inversely of the human body that becomes a machine, and the consequent dehumanization carried out by technology, the old theme of cyberpunk of which Matrix it is a late variation; the most daring theories developed by high-profile scientists belonging to the field of physics, illustrated here with a speculative approach.

Theories that are the basis of the strongest visions of physics, such as that according to which the reality we know is fleeting, subtle, or that of the absence, non-existence, of time. Concepts elaborated by an arc of personalities along which we find the English physicist-mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose and the Italian Carlo Rovelli. Di Penrose – to whom we owe many fundamental discoveries, including those on black holes that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 together with the German Reinhard Genzel and the American Andrea Ghez – in the film we find the most daring theory, according to which human consciousness would be a quantum phenomenon and the related information is transmitted at the subatomic level by the protein-based microtubules present in our cells. In this sense, over the course of many years, also joining the neurobiologist doctor Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona, Penrose has carried out experimental research that has found various confirmations.

According to the physicist, if a person dies even temporarily, information is released from microtubules in the universe, and this quantum information could exist indefinitely “as a soul”. If today science theorizes parallel universes once hypothesized only by science fiction, some physicists at the Max Planck Institute claim that consciousness would travel endlessly towards parallel universes after death. Not to mention the theory of the multiverse, now inflated in the cinema (since the recent Spider-Man: No way home until the next Marvel movie Doctor strange in the multiverse of madness) but which has Penrose among its critics.

Of course, these theses are still debated and an answer is up to science, but it must be said that the ideas of Penrose and Hameroff have found important experimental validations, so much so that it seems established that various biological processes, including non-human ones, are influenced by quantum mechanics (a synthesis la can also be found in this article of the Sole 24 Ore).

What we are interested in emphasizing, however, is that in reality, on a deeper level, the saga of Matrix is about consciousness. Or rather, it unfolds among the various consciousnesses, its various stages and levels. Other “realities”? Other universes? No one knows anymore, and for Matrix Resurrections all of this is more true than ever. We are in the unknowable. The death-resurrection of Neo (Keanu Reeves), the déjà vu, the fragments of memories and dreams that perhaps falsify reality and perhaps not, are not present just to make a meta-film about cinema or the cycle of Matrix.

The Wachowskis almost managed to hypnotize, to dominate the public without tyranny and manipulation, especially the younger ones, making them fall into one of the most claustrophobic science fiction films ever: theirs is a science fiction without spaceships traveling between planets. , suns, galaxies; you never see the firmament from the Earth, be it that of Matrix or the one outside the mystification of the program, not even to contemplate it. After all, we never contemplate and there is never a real “outside”, except for a few fleeting moments (Trinity who in the third chapter of the saga, Matrix Revolutions, manages to go beyond the wall of black clouds that envelops the planet and to see the blue sky); in Matrix the universe – the absurd yet logical universe as an equation – is here quite “internal”. It is not clear what “exists” really. We are far beyond the reality show that the cinema was already putting in perspective a year before the release of the first Matrix, with the film The Truman show by Peter Weir, 1998.

So what’s left? What certainty? Is old age also an illusion? In the mirror or in the reality of Matrix? There remains the inner feeling of old age, fleeting life and love as the only absolute reality. The spectator is kind to the latter Matrix, who has the often fragile and uncertain face and body of Keanu Reeves and the new resolve of Carrie-Ann Moss. The resurrection of Neo, the chosen one, passes through its mutation, through its doubling. To find the unity of the fragments.