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Outroduction
In 1999, the year before the turn of the millennium when we all thought all computers were going to crash at midnight, the Wachowskis released the first film in what later became the Matrix trilogy and the fourth film will be released in the midst of the COVID epidemic in 2021. In the first film, when the main character Neo chooses to take the red pill, he is thrown into a world so radically different from the one he knows, that he is forced to abandon all his previous knowledge of what reality is. The first time Morpheus plunges Neo into the matrix and he lands in a seemingly endless white place with clean, painless clothes and hair, he looks at himself in disbelief and says: This isn't real!. To which Morpheus replies:
What is real? How do you define what's real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then what's real is simply an electrical signal interpreted by your brain. It's the world you know. The world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It now exists only within the framework of a neuro-interactive simulation that we call the matrix. You've been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today.
Morpheus changes TV channel and shows Neo the whole post-apocalyptic dystopia where humans are reduced to batteries to power the AI-run machine world. It's at this point that the camera dives in, and the next shot repositions the two characters in a dark, ravaged world. As the camera zooms back in on Morpheus, he can be heard uttering the words that will shake viewers to their core: Welcome to the desert of reality!
This sentence becomes the turning point of the film and a revelation for Neo and for all of us who came out of the film relatively unscathed. Neo begins to understand the horror that lies beneath the virtual construction of algorithmic operations, and so do we, the viewers. But Morpheus doesn't just confront Neo with horror, because in this sentence, the desert functions as a complex and extended metaphor, which at the same time potentiates binary oppositions. We generally think of deserts as lifeless, places of perdition, spaces without water, shade or easily accessible food. But for those who learn to navigate in the desert, who master how to read these particular ecosystems, deserts become something else.
This is precisely what Neo does throughout the first film - he learns to read the matrix. He learns to read the code, the mistakes, the repetitions, which allows him to understand the AI and stand up to it. Interestingly, he never completely destroys the AI, but learns to talk to it and communicate with it. And it's no coincidence that before his awakening, before the red pill, Neo was a programmer and a hacker. He was, in a way, already halfway there. By joining Morpheus and learning rigorously from him, he simply turned his knowledge into art.
What's striking about this character is that he embodies a particular type of artist. Nurtured by his scientific knowledge, Trinity's love, Morpheus' rigorous training and his unconditional belief that Neo is the one who will solve the catastrophic situation, Neo begins to use his personal agency to build a different kind of reality: he builds a new world and does so seamlessly, almost effortlessly, as an artistic gesture. Like an artist, he reflects on his reality, questions it, deconstructs it and rebuilds something else from the pieces at his disposal. Neo devotes himself entirely to this process, to the point where he seems to sacrifice himself physically by surrendering himself to the machines that execute the source code, but he emerges from it more knowledgeable and stronger. Neo doesn't change - his character doesn't undergo massive external transformations - he simply gains a better understanding, a broader picture of the forces at play. And that's real.
Outroduction
In 1999, the year before the turn of the millennium when we all thought all computers were going to crash at midnight, the Wachowskis released the first film in what later became the Matrix trilogy and the fourth film will be released in the midst of the COVID epidemic in 2021. In the first film, when the main character Neo chooses to take the red pill, he is thrown into a world so radically different from the one he knows, that he is forced to abandon all his previous knowledge of what reality is. The first time Morpheus plunges Neo into the matrix and he lands in a seemingly endless white place with clean, painless clothes and hair, he looks at himself in disbelief and says: This isn't real!. To which Morpheus replies:
What is real? How do you define what's real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then what's real is simply an electrical signal interpreted by your brain. It's the world you know. The world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It now exists only within the framework of a neuro-interactive simulation that we call the matrix. You've been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today.
Morpheus changes TV channel and shows Neo the whole post-apocalyptic dystopia where humans are reduced to batteries to power the AI-run machine world. It's at this point that the camera dives in, and the next shot repositions the two characters in a dark, ravaged world. As the camera zooms back in on Morpheus, he can be heard uttering the words that will shake viewers to their core: Welcome to the desert of reality!
This sentence becomes the turning point of the film and a revelation for Neo and for all of us who came out of the film relatively unscathed. Neo begins to understand the horror that lies beneath the virtual construction of algorithmic operations, and so do we, the viewers. But Morpheus doesn't just confront Neo with horror, because in this sentence, the desert functions as a complex and extended metaphor, which at the same time potentiates binary oppositions. We generally think of deserts as lifeless, places of perdition, spaces without water, shade or easily accessible food. But for those who learn to navigate in the desert, who master how to read these particular ecosystems, deserts become something else.
This is precisely what Neo does throughout the first film - he learns to read the matrix. He learns to read the code, the mistakes, the repetitions, which allows him to understand the AI and stand up to it. Interestingly, he never completely destroys the AI, but learns to talk to it and communicate with it. And it's no coincidence that before his awakening, before the red pill, Neo was a programmer and a hacker. He was, in a way, already halfway there. By joining Morpheus and learning rigorously from him, he simply turned his knowledge into art.
What's striking about this character is that he embodies a particular type of artist. Nurtured by his scientific knowledge, Trinity's love, Morpheus' rigorous training and his unconditional belief that Neo is the one who will solve the catastrophic situation, Neo begins to use his personal agency to build a different kind of reality: he builds a new world and does so seamlessly, almost effortlessly, as an artistic gesture. Like an artist, he reflects on his reality, questions it, deconstructs it and rebuilds something else from the pieces at his disposal. Neo devotes himself entirely to this process, to the point where he seems to sacrifice himself physically by surrendering himself to the machines that execute the source code, but he emerges from it more knowledgeable and stronger. Neo doesn't change - his character doesn't undergo massive external transformations - he simply gains a better understanding, a broader picture of the forces at play. And that's real.