On January 14, 2022, the movie "The Matrix 4: Matrix Reboot" was released in China.
After 22 years of the first release of "The Matrix", compared with the shocking effect caused by concepts such as artificial intelligence, brain-computer interface, and immersive virtual reality, the science fiction of the past is now the reality, allowing people to confirm and smile nostalgically at the film.
"The Matrix", which came out in 1999, imagined the information age of the 22nd century at the end of the 20th century, not the doomsday prophecy, but the rebirth of nirvana, giving the vision of the ultimate future of human society, which contains the ideas of science and technology, society, politics, history, philosophy, religion and so on, integrating things, like a kaleidoscope, opening the screen cyberpunk science fiction metaverse.
When humans are ruled by machines
The term Cyberpunk, cyberpunk comes from cybernetics, which stands for things related to the Internet or computers, and broadly stands for science fiction, and punk comes from a musical style that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s and represents rebellion. As a genre of science fiction literature, cyberpunk was fixed in the 1980s and depicted a future antocite in which human beings were overly dependent on technology, machines replaced humans, environmental pollution, the division between rich and poor, institutions were strict, and equality and freedom no longer existed, but in this deteriorating reality, revolutionary forces and the hope of rebirth surged forward.
Stills from The Matrix 2: Reloaded. Cyberpunk has an Asian cultural gene, "The Matrix" not only promotes Chinese martial arts to the world, but also makes the use of kung fu by foreigners the new normal of on-screen action scenes, but also understands and respects oriental culture in terms of ideological connotation
In 1995, Japanese director Mori Oshii produced the anime Ghost in the Shell, which became a landmark work in cyberpunk visualization. "The Matrix" director Wachowski is an avid "Ghost in the Shell" fanatical, not only borrowing from the Japanese anime back-of-brain interface, green code world, bazaar chase scenes and other shapes and scenes, inheriting the theme of "what is the self, what is the essence of life, what is the soul", and the left-wing color is even more consistent. "Ghost in the Shell" director Oshii Mori belongs to Japan's post-war "security generation", after the failure of the "Japan-US Security Treaty", this generation of left-wing youth lost ideals, soulless, cold and mournful, seeing themselves and others as machine puppets, constantly questioning the meaning of their own existence. Born in the late 1960s, Wachowski was an anti-Vietnam War, counterculture hippie "flower child", experiencing the disillusionment of reality, rebelling against capitalist society and its way of life, deeply influenced by Eastern religions, including seeing the flow of light in psychedelics, experiencing the illusion of death and detachment, and continuing the language and cultural revolution after the social movement receded.
In The Matrix, in parliament, the supreme authority in the human base of "Zion City", the parliamentarians are world cultural pluralists, with colorful indigenous hair braided hair, dressed in bohemian clothing, and the speaker is a woman, like a group of remnants of a left-wing movement. Of course, the change from brother to sister of the two Wachowski directors is also a revolution that subverts traditional gender concepts.
The protagonist of "The Matrix" lives a double life, during the day his name is Thomas Anderson, a 996 yard farmer of a big software company, "watching TV, going to work, going to pay taxes, going to church", only promises, following the rules, and at night with the screen name of "Neo", he is foul and foul in the online world. The film was released at a time when the Internet era was just emerging, full of romantic imaginations of hackers. Neo was once told the horror of the fact that machines ruled over humans, humans were used as biological batteries, and he thought that reality was illusory, the virtual world of the "matrix", a neural interactive simulation system created by machines to control human consciousness.
The matrix world in the film is the end of the 20th century, the reality is already the end of the 22nd century, the film predicted in 1999 that the rise of the information age will not bring freedom, but deeper control, human body and spirit are double enslaved. From Marx's alienation and Lukács's materialization, to Foucault's "panoramic open prison", to Baudrillard's "Imitation and Simulation", which is a footnote in the film, the books used by Neo to hide the hacker disks, provide The Matrix with abundant ideological resources: industrial civilization under capitalism, man has become a vassal of the machine, and in modern consumerist society, the simulated reality created by the mass media and the Internet has long replaced reality. The human spirit lives in the image, and the choice you think is autonomous is actually the manipulation of big data algorithms. The desire to be created, the choice to be left and right, and the false persona on social media are easy to think of keywords such as online life and the Internet celebrity economy today. People went from the coercive bondage of "1984" to the enslavement of "happiness" in Brave New World, which stimulated the senses and vulgar entertainment. Many people have adapted and become addicted, and even turned to defend it, preferring to live in a false sound dog and horse rather than face the desert of reality, like the rebellious Sever in "The Matrix", tired of eating snot-like paste every day, eating delicious and juicy steaks in the matrix, willing to go back to being a human flesh battery, "6 years, I figured it out, ignorance is happiness."
The difference between man and machine
"The Matrix" starts from the difference between real and illusory, first of all, the difference between man and machine, which leads to the questioning of the self, from which to establish the human self, the characteristics of human beings, the preciousness of human nature, the value and reason for proving the existence of human beings, after all, all external problems will eventually lead to human thinking about the self. When people are constantly mechanized, until the wiring behind the brain is bubbled in a biochemical capsule, like a figurative "brain in a cylinder", all perceptions are virtual electronic signals, what is the difference between man and machine? In the movie, Morpheus says, "You live in a dream world," reminiscent of Descartes' earliest question: Have we been living in a dream manipulated by demons? Descartes obtains the truth through doubt, everything can be doubted, but the doubting I cannot be doubted, as the subject, able to think, have a rational "I" is established.
In the first part of "The Matrix", Neo begins to awaken from the suspicion of all the unreality around him, and under the guidance of Morpheus, he leaps through the building in the virtual world, "throwing away all selfish distractions, throwing away fear, and liberating your mind", in order to see through the falseness of the matrix world, all perceptions in the matrix, including death, are just signals manipulating the brain. Neo goes to see the Prophet to see if he is the Savior, and the Prophet's lintel reads "Know Thyself"—a proverb from the ancient Greek temple of Delphi. The Prophet is also only a guide, and the Savior and the future are not decided by the Prophet, but by Neo himself, believing that man has free will and independent choice, not fatalism. These plots describe the "man" of the West from ancient Greece, re-established through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, who has free will and is able to understand and transform the world by reason. Kant said that "man legislates nature", and man takes the place of God as the center of the universe. Until after World War II, existentialism still emphasized the right of man to choose in the face of the absurdity of the world. It is also the arrogance of people and the excessive admiration of reason that leads to the proliferation of instrumental rationality, the supremacy of science and technology, and the admonition of society, and human nature is suppressed, and people are more and more like machines.
Abandon cold reason and choose warm humanity
There are various procedures in the matrix, which appear in human form, but they are mechanical, causal deterministic thinking, judging by data and probability, acting according to orders and executions. In 2003's "The Matrix 2: Reloaded", Neo found the Frenchman Merovinga in order to go to the matrix source code, who put the law of cause and effect on his lips, clarified the motive to act, got paid to do things, denied free choice, "choice is an illusion, a trick between the authorities and the powerless." Off-topic is that The Matrix is full of historical, religious, and mythological elements, such as Morpheus, whose name is derived from the ancient Greek god of dreams, and the spaceship nebuchadnezzar that he piloted, the babylonian emperor who conquered the Jews in the Bible, who dreamed of the golden statue at night, prophesied the return of Christ, referring to the matrix as a dream, and Mephis believing in the myth of the Savior. Merovingian, the first dynasty of the ancient Frankish kingdom (Merovingian Dynasty), played by Monica Bellucci, whose wife is Called Persephone, is the queen of Greek mythology, referring to Merovingian as the ruler of the underworld of the program and the former savior, now engaged in smuggling, with a group of ghostly programs — twin ghosts, vampires and werewolves.
Stills from The Matrix 2: Reloaded. The Matrix is full of historical, religious, and mythological elements, such as Morpheus's name derived from the ancient Greek god of dreams; Monica Bellucci plays his wife, Persephone, a Greek mythology queen who refers to Merovinga as the ruler of the procedural underworld, once a savior, but now engaged in smuggling
The French in Hollywood movies often symbolize the mysterious eccentricity, obscenity, and ruthless utilitarianism of old Europe and the old era. Ironically, Neo and his party ignored Merowinga's law of cause and effect and beat him to death and got the key. Neo, the American hero as the latest savior, entered the source, met the matrix architect and learned that the so-called savior is a collection of all data anomalies, the function is to carry the data into the source and delete, prompt the matrix to restart, and then choose 23 people to rebuild Zion, do not do this, data errors will lead to system crashes, killing everyone in the matrix. Neo is the sixth savior, the Matrix is already the fifth version, and Zion has been destroyed five times. The architect is the father of the matrix, adhering to the mechanical determinism, striving for the precise balance of the matrix like a mathematical formula, but due to human imperfection, too perfect or too dark the matrix fails one after another and is not accepted by human consciousness. So there was the Prophet, the mother of the matrix, the program used to study the human mind, she represented emotions, beliefs, hopes, intuition, subconscious and other irrational factors, concocted the myth of the savior, gave people hope, gave people the right to choose, guaranteed the stability of several generations of new versions of the system, and led to a total of one percent of people choosing to escape the matrix. So the architect used the savior to delete and restart again and again, and so on.
Stills from The Matrix 2: Reloaded
Whether it is the architect uncle or the prophet aunt, it is the program of the matrix, the smooth plot of the matrix, and the purpose is that human beings will not wake up for a long time and continue to be ruled by machines. The savior is a lie, the choice is another kind of control, the dream wakes up and there is no way out, the revolution is just a shuffle and a repeat, nothing will change. But the difference this time is that the prophet instilled the element of "love" into Neo, promoting the love of Neo and Trinity, "love", the most elusive puzzle of human nature, unreasonable, purposeless, and boundless magic, so that Neo chose to save his lover, rather than like his previous predecessors, according to reason, taking the old road to save most people, so that things developed in an unpredictable and unprecedented direction. This kind of "train fork problem" plot of saving one person or saving everyone, There are many Hollywood movies, and the Batman movie "The Dark Knight" is the same, the seemingly irrational choice is to abandon cold rationality and choose warm humanity, and the result is that all people are saved.
The harmonious coexistence of man and machine
Western philosophical thought, starting from Socrates and Plato, to Descartes' establishment of the Archimedean point of "I think, therefore I am", has always been trapped in the dilemma of the dichotomy of subject and object, man is composed of two parts, mind and body, with clear boundaries on each other, relying on reason to distinguish between things and me, and the way of human liberation is either hoping for God's redemption or resorting to rational perfection. In The Matrix 3: The Matrix Revolution, Trinity pilots the Logos into the Machine Empire to negotiate, Neo's name alludes to Christ, Trinity's name is the Christian concept of "Trinity" theology, and Logos is the philosophical reason for man to know the world. After World War II, in the face of the civilization disaster caused by rationalism and the supremacy of science and technology, postmodernism set off a wave of criticism of modernity and reflected on Western civilization. Foucault declares "man dead" after "God is dead", dissolving the subject, decentralizing, subverting reason, but leaving a void of unknowable. When choosing bankruptcy, loss of reason, and self-dissolution, "The Matrix" cites Eastern philosophical religions to fill the vacuum of Western thought, from the duality of the West, the separation of things and self, to the unity of the East, natural peace. In the first part of the film, there is a little priest in the Prophet's residence who teaches Neo to bend the spoon with his superpowers, "Don't try to bend the spoon, but instead, try to know the truth - the spoon does not exist, and you will see that it is not the spoon that bends, but yourself." No longer clinging to appearances, but seeing through appearances, what changes is not the spoon, but the human mind, which is very zen public case meaning of "non-wind movement, non-movement, benevolent heart".
Stills from The Matrix 1. In the movie, there is a little priest in the prophet's residence, who teaches Neo to bend the spoon with his superpowers, and tells him that it is not the spoon that has changed, but the human mind, guiding him to stop clinging to appearances and see through appearances. "The Matrix" cites Eastern philosophical religions to fill the vacuum of Western thought, from the duality of the West, the separation of things and self, to the unity of the East, natural peace
At the end of the first part of "The Matrix", Neo, who died in the matrix, is resurrected, and everything in the matrix is a code that can be modified at will in his eyes, and he has obtained the superpowers of any left and right matrix world, stopping bullets with his bare hands, leaning over to avoid bullets, and being omnipotent in heaven and earth. At the end of the second part, Neo is able to paralyze the machine octopus with his bare hands, bringing the matrix's superpowers into the real world, and for a time the body is not plugged in, and the consciousness is detached from the body and comes to the program transit station. In the third part, the wounded and blind Neo enters the Machine City, such a dark and terrible place, in his perception is a world of golden light flowing. The movie is based on the analogy between the program and the machine - mind and body, the human soul is nothing more than a program that can be uploaded, deleted, and encoded, if the first one from the virtual as the real to the virtual as the virtual, to see through the illusion of the matrix world, then the second with this understanding, abandon the illusion of the senses, see through the illusion of the real world, break the reality into the virtual. Matrices are not true, and reality is not true.
For a long time, the debate that Zion is also a matrix world has been endless, and many viewers cannot understand why Neo also has superpowers in reality, to which director Lana Wachowski said: "The virtual world is not only the matrix, the golden light is the core of deconstruction", full of regrets about people's unconsciousness. She adds: "Neo stands on the brink of enlightenment, ready to resolve the paradoxes of choice and non-choice, free will and destiny, but this can only be achieved by renunciation, when he abandons the perspective of truth and accepts the totality of consciousness, which eventually leads to an evolutionary transformation that transcends the dilemma of Cartesianism and offers the world the choice of a third path, that is, Neo's path, the path of peace." "The layman takes matter as reality, but the enlightened sees the energy that flows without dwelling and gathers impermanence. From obsessing with the distinction between man-machine, virtual reality, material self, subject and object, fate and free will, to not distinguishing, to achieve the realm of the unity of heaven and man, the forgetting of things and self, and the emptiness of reality and reality. Since then, the connotation of the film has suddenly jumped, and the entanglement of the "brain in the cylinder" no longer exists, abandoning the opposing obsessions of right and wrong, good and evil, good and evil, life and death, not machines and human beings, but seeking harmonious coexistence.
In the film, Agent Smith is the program that removes illegal programs from the matrix system, he destroys Neo but is killed by Neo, carrying each other's code, resulting in arithmetic errors, becoming an infinitely replicating virus, about to occupy the matrix, invading the machine, and triggering a common crisis between the machine and humans. Ironically, Smith, who was originally extremely hostile to humans, calling them an earth virus that multiplies infinitely, destroys the environment, and plunders resources, has now transformed into this virus. He can also be loaded into the human body, as if possessed by a soul. Neo and Smith are not so much nemesis as one, and this kind of two-sided, good and evil choice is common in films such as Harry Potter, but "The Matrix" focuses not on dichotomy and choice, but on transformation and unity. Neo finally realized the "Tao" of yin and yang dissipation, balance and unity, fearless, and gladly embraced the opposite, and the positive and negative annihilation and complete silence of the two ushered in a new era of humanity and matrix.
Stills from The Matrix 2: Reloaded. In the film, Agent Smith is the program that removes illegal programs from the Matrix system, he destroys Neo but is killed by Neo, carrying each other's code, resulting in a calculation error and becoming an infinitely replicated virus
The way out for the future is in the East
Cyberpunk is a "post-human" culture, man is no longer the center of the material world and the spiritual world, the world is not unique to human beings, nor is it exclusive to human beings, and there is no eternal and unchanging essence of human beings. Accept the demise of humanity, the era of artificial intelligence or a new stage of human active evolution. After the end of the world is detachment, after the end of the world is the rebirth. In the movie, the matrix of artificial intelligence helps people transcend the material world and evolve into a pure conscious body, and the program also evolves, and the Indian family, which is actually a power plant program, actually has the crystallization of love and gives birth to a little girl, who has the ability to optimize the matrix. Smith, the minions of the matrix system, all have the idea of getting rid of the matrix and pursuing freedom. The evolution of the program towards people, the matrix environment is more humane, and people can come and go freely, which is a happy ending that gives great comfort.
Cyberpunk also has Asian cultural genes, "The Matrix" not only introduced Chinese martial arts to the world, but also made the use of kung fu by foreigners the new normal of on-screen action scenes, but also deeply understood and respected oriental culture in terms of ideological connotation. At the end of the third part, the firewall program "Seraphi" played by Chinese Zou Zhaolong and the Indian girl program greet the beautiful sunrise, implying that the future is in the East. This kind of Western material civilization and Eastern spiritual civilization, Western technology and Eastern wisdom, is the last two magic weapons and two ways out of human beings at the moment of life and death, and it is not uncommon in Hollywood movies: in "The Matrix", when the Great Armageddon, Zion's mech army meets the mechanical squid, Neo Enlightenment Nirvana; in "The Avengers", it is the two generals who finally meet when facing Thanos: one is the mech warrior Iron Man, and the other is the strange doctor who can spell the mind of the East.
"The Matrix" is such a movie, you think it is science, in fact, it is philosophy; think it is philosophy, in fact, it is religion; think it is Christianity, in fact, it is Buddhism; think it is talking about machines, in fact, it is talking about people, and now I have to add a sentence, thinking that it is the future, in fact, it is the present.