The Matrix

The Matrix starts from a hypothesis philosophy has entertained since Descartes: what if everything I perceive were manufactured to deceive me? From this the film draws two questions that guide everything that follows. The first is about truth: would we want to know, if knowing made life harder? The second is about freedom: are our choices our own, if everything seems written in advance?

First question: is a hard truth better than a happy illusion? Thomas Anderson, a programmer by day and a hacker by night under the name Neo, senses that something is wrong with the world. Morpheus, a man the authorities are hunting, reveals to him that this world is a simulation, the Matrix, produced by machines to keep humans asleep. It is Descartes's evil demon made concrete: a power able to manufacture all our sensations. But the film shifts the question. Descartes asked whether we can know; The Matrix asks whether we want to know.

Morpheus holds out two pills. The blue one: Neo will wake up in his bed and believe whatever he wants. The red one: he will see "how deep the rabbit hole goes". The image comes from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which the film has been following from the start: a message on Neo's screen had already told him to "follow the white rabbit". Morpheus promises nothing but the truth, and Neo chooses it without knowing what it will cost him. The real is a desert: humans grown in pods to power the machines, tasteless food, a war the last free humans can barely sustain. Morpheus puts it in the words of Jean Baudrillard, "the desert of the real", and Neo had hidden his pirated disks in a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. But that book describes a world where simulacra have taken the place of the real, to the point that there is no stable original left to compare them with; the film keeps a real behind the simulation, and makes it hostile. That is what gives the choice its weight: Neo cannot tell himself that the truth will make him happy.

Cypher, one of Morpheus's companions, embodies the other answer. Freed as well, he wonders aloud why he didn't take the blue pill. He has no illusions about the illusion: he knows it is false and misses it all the same. He is like the person Nozick imagines facing his experience machine, which would let you live, by simulation, every experience you desire: if pleasure is real for the one who feels it, what does it matter where it comes from? For Nozick we would refuse, because we want to do things, not merely have the impression of doing them. Cypher would accept. And he is not alone in preferring the illusion: Morpheus warns Neo that most of the people inside the Matrix are not ready to be unplugged, and that many would fight to defend the system that holds them.

Second question: are our choices our own, if everything is written in advance? Morpheus believes in a prophecy: a chosen one, the One, will come to free humanity, and he thinks he has found him in Neo. Even the name seems to announce it: Neo is an anagram of One, as if his role were written before him. Yet when Morpheus asks whether he believes in fate, Neo says no: he does not like the idea of not being in control of his life. Morpheus takes him to the Oracle, a woman who foretells the future. Above her kitchen door is a Latin inscription, Temet nosce, "know thyself", the Delphic motto Socrates made his own. The Oracle adds that being the One is like being in love: no one can tell you, you just know. She will not tell Neo who he is; she sends the question back to him.

One detail of the visit puts the prophecy to the test. The Oracle tells Neo not to worry about a vase; he turns, knocks it over and breaks it. She then asks whether he would have broken it if she had said nothing. The prediction is part of what it predicts, to the point that we can no longer tell whether she foretells the future or produces it. Agent Smith, one of the programs that watch over the Matrix and who interrogated Neo early in the film, sees none of this: for him humans are a disease with predictable behavior, and everything is settled in advance. Between the free will Neo claims and the destiny Morpheus announces, the film looks for room for a choice that would truly be ours.

The two questions meet, provided we distinguish two senses of freedom. The first is metaphysical: are our choices determined, or written in advance? The second is practical: to be free is to know what one is doing. In this second sense, someone living in an illusion can do as they please, but does not know what they are doing. That is why Morpheus calls the Matrix a prison for the mind: the servitude he wants to free Neo from is not a constraint one feels, it is ignorance. The film slides from one to the other: it shows that knowing gives power (second sense) and treats that as freedom, without saying whether such freedom would hold against a prophecy (first sense). Its answer is therefore more fragile than it looks.

Outside the film, the question is quieter. Everyone has a blue pill: not opening the test results, not asking what a loved one really thinks, holding on to a belief that keeps us standing. And everyone sometimes says of a breakup or a failure that it was "meant to be". Neo looks without knowing what he will see, and refuses to let anyone write his life for him; Cypher, who looked, would rather not have seen. Between them, the film asks a single question: must we know the real to be free, even when it makes life harder?