Ideology Reloaded

By Slavoj Zizek, In These Times. Posted June 24, 2003.

There is something inherently naive about taking the “philosophical” underpinning of The Matrix series seriously and discussing its implications. The Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the films, are not philosophers, but just two guys who flirt with and exploit, in an often confused way, some “postmodern” and New Age notions in the service of science fiction. But The Matrix is one of those films that function as a kind of Rorschach test, setting in motion the universalized process of recognition, like the proverbial painting of God that seems always to stare directly at you from wherever you look at it -- practically every orientation seems to recognize itself in it.

My Lacanian friends are telling me that the authors must have read Lacan. The Frankfurt School partisans see in The Matrix the extrapolated embodiment of Kulturindustrie, directly taking over, colonizing our inner life itself, using us as the source of energy. New Agers see how our world is just a mirage generated by a global Mind embodied in the World Wide Web. Or the series is a baroque illustration of Plato’s cave, in which ordinary humans are prisoners, tied firmly to their seats and compelled to watch the shadowy performance of (what they falsely consider to be) reality -- in short, the position of the cinema spectators themselves.

This search for the philosophical content of The Matrix is therefore a lure, a trap to be avoided. Such readings that project into the film refined philosophical or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions are effectively much inferior to a naïve immersion that I witnessed when I saw The Matrix at a local theater in Slovenia. I had the unique opportunity to sit close to a man in his late twenties who was so engrossed in the film that he repeatedly disturbed other spectators with loud exclamations like: “My God, wow, so there is no reality! So we are all puppets!”

However, what is interesting is to read The Matrix movies not as containing a consistent philosophical discourse, but as rendering, in their very inconsistencies, the antagonisms of our ideological and social predicament. What, then, is the Matrix? Simply what Lacan called the “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. The big Other pulls the strings; the subject doesn’t speak, the subject “is spoken” by the symbolic structure. This big Other is the name for the social Substance, for all that on account of which the subject never fully dominates the effects of his acts; his activity is always something else than what he aimed at or anticipated. And the inconsistencies of the film’s narrative perfectly mirror the difficulties of our breaking out of the constraints of the social Substance.

When Morpheus tries to explain to the still perplexed Neo what the Matrix is, he links it to a failure in the structure of the universe: “What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there is something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is. But it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.” Yet toward the end of the first film, Smith, the agent of the Matrix, gives a different, much more Freudian explanation: “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. ... As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.”

The imperfection of our world is thus at the same time the sign of its virtuality and the sign of its reality. Linked to this inconsistency is the ambiguous status of the liberation of humanity announced by Neo in the last scene of the first film. As the result of Neo’s intervention, there is a “system failure” in the Matrix. At the same time, Neo addresses people still caught in it as the Savior who will teach them how to liberate themselves from the constraints of the Matrix; they will be able to break its physical laws, bend metals, fly in the air. But the problem is that all these “miracles” are possible only if we remain within the virtual reality sustained by the Matrix and merely bend or change its rules; our “real” status is still that of the slaves. We are, as it were, merely gaining additional power to change our mental prison rules. So what about exiting from the Matrix altogether and entering the “real reality” in which we are miserable creatures living on the destroyed earth’s surface? Is the solution a postmodern strategy of “resistance,” of endlessly “subverting” or “displacing” the power system, or a more radical attempt at annihilating it?

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