March 31 marks 25 years of Matrix, the film that guided us to the doors of the 21st century. An instant global phenomenon, the saga signed by sisters Lana and Lily Wachowski represented a breakthrough, a before and after in the history of cinema: a perfect mix of philosophical ambition and technical innovation, it is the definitive text to think about the digital condition and the horizons that this poses. The story is well known: it tells us about Neo, a hacker announced as the savior of humanity, which is locked in a digital simulacrum and enslaved by machines. As a result of the need to obtain energy, an extractivist model has been imposed that has led to total ecological devastation and complete alienation of the individual, cut off from his own body and from any community: the new status-quo requires the transfer of consciousness human to a virtual reality controlled by programs, from which only a few rebels have managed to escape.
Any reading of these films falls short. They are a plea in favor of imagination and its limitless power: “Matrix is sound and vision, pop poetry, a multitude of threads that converge at the same time,” explains Ales Kot, whom we know in Spain for works in comics such as Zero (ECC Editions, 2014), Wild children (ECC Ediciones, 2015) or Bloodborne (Norma Editorial, 2019-2021) and who is currently completely dedicated to scriptwriting and film and television production in the North American sphere. His works, radically political, have much in common with the work of the Wachowskis. “One of the interpretations of Matrix What seemed clear as day to me is that you don't have to be your conditioning. Get upset. Pay attention to power. Stand up to him and stand up for what is right. His works have given me strength to make art that is decidedly my own, subversive and sincere.”
As Kot explains, The Matrix is “a trans text, a cyberpunka text queer and a text about the world we live in”, something that is constructed narratively, yes, but also through the aesthetic device. Who doesn't remember the festival of leather and black latex, the sunglasses or the electronic music forever linked to these films? Within the matrix there are two worlds: a corporate one of skyscrapers, white shirts and ties, in which alienated workers live, and a hedonistic one, of hackers and clandestine raves, which is what lights up the revolution. This also speaks to the spirit of the times: in 1998, a year before the film's release, Simon Reynolds published his Energy Flash (Contra, 2014), a review of the musical movements that constituted the dance culture underground between the late eighties and early nineties. At that time, many embraced the postulates of TAZ and the “techno-rebel” futuristic model described by Alvin Toffler in The third wave (Plaza & Janés, 1993), understanding technology as a form of empowerment and resistance against the same plutocracy that invents and mass produces the machines that supplant us.
Subjected to the creativity of the individual and his liberated will, the zeros and ones become flesh, as if it were a biblical miracle. His mastery of technology allows Neo to touch, harm and even resurrect the dead within the matrix: allows you to rebel. The films, although set in the digital world, have a strong erotic, carnal component, which runs through all of the Wachowskis' work, from burning ties (1996), with its lesbian romance and sadomasochistic aesthetic, until Sense8 (Netflix, 2015-2017), which postulated the construction of global communities outside national or geographic borders and whose communion was also represented through group sex. The series, formally innovative and with very high production costs, was canceled after two seasons and abruptly closed with a film that served as a concession to the protests of its fans.
The irredentant character queer of these works – which deconstruct the genre and declare themselves anti-system at every turn of the road – makes the persistent attempts of the North American extreme right to appropriate them striking: the image of the choice to which Neo submits, between a blue pill (remaining in the illusion of the matrix) and a red pill (knowing the truth and freeing oneself, but entering an uncertain future) has served various reactionary sectors to advertise their ideology as the only possible reality. Lana Wachowski's response to Ivanka Trump and the now owner of the social network, Elon Musk, is already internet history when they declared on Twitter (X), after voting for Donald Trump in the 2020 elections, that they had taken the pill Red: “Fuck you both.”
Their language has also been widely adopted by the incel community, a group of radicalized misogynistic young people, self-proclaimed “involuntary celibates,” who the Spanish Gala Hernández recently portrayed in fluid mechanics (2022), short film awarded at the SEMINCI in Valladolid and nominated for the César Awards. “Certainly the movies don't say what that sociopathic, power-hungry, colonial-fascist segment of society wants to believe they say,” says Ales Kot, who considers these attempts to turn the meaning of the movies around “weak and intellectually vague.” ”. The Wachowskis talk about imagination, creativity, change; For him, the opposite of what these ideologies postulate. “They are so afraid of change that they want their world to always remain the same, like scared children clinging to a dead past,” he says.
In Matrixlibido and revolution go hand in hand and the forces of order are precisely some bots deindividualized, de-erotized and, at least initially, devoid of an ego differentiated from the system. The influence of the Wachowski sisters' vision on subsequent art has been monumental: “from burning ties From then on they became a force that gu
ided so much of what is possible today in pop cinema, in cinema queer and trans, in subversive cinema… I think we are only beginning to glimpse its profound influence. I see them everywhere, from Jane Schoenbrun's horror dramas to John Wick and their hilarious outings; from fashion to post-internet,” says Kot.
Today, when images of cars that drive themselves while the driver works with virtual reality glasses on go viral, the techno-optimism of Matrix It may seem naive, although Lana Wachowski herself took care of updating her futuristic vision to the challenges of the present in The Matrix Resurrections (2021). Decidedly anti-nostalgic, this shows us a Neo – the one who was the messiah of the digital revolution – obsolete in the new web 3.0, full of bots, data networks and programs capable of bending his powers. The film adopts a new 'capitalist realism' (Mark Fisher, Caja Negra, 2016) to reflect on its own character as a franchise and successful product in the market, which contrasts the failure of its emancipatory project and its hopeful desire to start over. It thus opposes the self-referential and anti-political character that characterizes most of the industry's blockbusters: “Nostalgia can be a useful ship, a vehicle for exploration: we go down to the depths of the past and unearth the present,” says Kot. “Unbridled nostalgia is a very different thing: if we continue to look back and dream of the past at the expense of the present, we are hurtling towards fascism, and resisting that impulse is our collective obligation.”
Its hybrid nature, its multimedia tentacles and that transmedia character that academics at the beginning of the century valued very positively (the saga was a pioneer of what Henry Jenkins called “convergence culture”, which had to emancipate the spectator-consumer, now actively involved and transformed into producer and consumer at the same time) was deactivated and co-opted by the system. The saga was turned into another franchise, which recurs in our culture as a pop shell empty of content. This represents a failure of the leap that it was trying to promote. Matrix, whose discourse and aesthetic apparatus do not fail to point out that what is important is out there, in the real world: “Keep fighting, keep changing, keep letting things go, keep looking, keep connecting with others, keep making art, keep living, still be there for others. Amplify the truth. Reject the lies,” says Kot. This is the message – or one of the messages – at the heart of the film, antithetical to the self-absorption with which our culture thinks of itself.
As a result of the latest scandal in which Inés Hernand was involved, for abusing the word “iconic” and applying it even to the President of the Government, a user of the social network X, who uses the name Pele, posted on this social network : “The culture of the iconic could not be more paradigmatic of these times: things no longer exist, only their representations.” Curiously, these words are very close to the warning that Matrix, with its multiple references to the theory of simulacrum, to Debord and Baudrillard, and its accumulation of intertextual quotes, which trusted that the form could be the message, tried to tell us: “We live in times of shameless support and denial of a genocide , of resurgence of the global extreme right. The Matrix is phenomenal, but no matter how momentous it is, a movie is a movie, and people still die,” Kot says.
Thus, bicots, digital activism and street protests, with slogans such as “Never again means never again to anyone”, respond more to its spirit than superficial celebrations or the collecting of products derived from the franchise. At a time that incites fan mobilization and consumption disguised as discourse, the pertinent thing is to adopt political positions; maybe that's why The Matrix Resurrections crashed in the market while the forgettable Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021) occupied all the theaters and broke box office records. In their construction of a metatext full of references, the Wachowskis metabolized the past, invented the future and built powerful metaphors that continue to invite us to think about the present and our place in it, to transform thought into action. The imperative inscribed in the work is to go beyond it and take sides: “The films of Matrix They are about the future as something that exists here, in the present, waiting: we better take care of the future that we want to see born and help illuminate it.”
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