Matrix/Meta, Meta/Matrix
Films about people trapped in stories.
Over Christmas weekend The Middlebrow, Scholar Wife and Renaissance Son watched the fourth installment of The Matrix universe, The Matrix: Resurrections. Then, we streamed Carrie Brownstein’s mockumentary about St. Vincent, The Nowhere Inn. Finally, we put on Adam McKay’s apcalypse drama Don’t Look Up.
Middlebrow supposes that as a society we should maybe forgive ourselves if the last couple of years have us all suspecting we’re trapped in somebody else’s story. The pandemic has stubbornly refused to release us. Online services continue to manipulate human brain chemistry (even though everybody now knows, which should mean the gig is up — perhaps the biggest letdown of Freud is that knowledge is not its own cure). Politics in the US remains depraved, and worse elsewhere. We humans are not trapped by conspiracy, but we are all part of narratives that are spun outside of our consent and control.
In The Matrix, humanity is trapped in a simulation by sentient machines that use human bodies as batteries in the real world. In the original trilogy, Agent Smith, who patrols the simulation looking for and eliminating woke anomalies who have figured things out, explains that the machines chose the imperfect world of the 1990s because anytime they offered humans something approaching Utopia they kept “waking up.” A certain amount of suffering is necessary or the whole enterprise fails for lack credibility.
In the latest Matrix, the simulation has been updated to reflect the 2020s. The original story is incorporated as a once popular and revolutionary computer game. Lana Wachowski, director of the latest film (and co-creator of the franchise with her sister Lilly) satirizes Warner Brothers, which had threatened in real life to reboot the series without her input — conscripting her into work on the film.
In the movie, the machines have learned that keeping people on edge and afraid turns their bodies into more effective charging stations. The machines have weaponized Instagram to manifest Tesla.
In The Nowhere Inn, real life friends Brownstein and Anne Erin Clarke (stage name, St. Vincent) agree to create a concert documentary, which will involve director Brownstein appearing in the film, turning it into a metafeature. Brownstein’s father is dying and wants to see the completed film, so Brownstein succumbs to pressure to make things interesting. But Clarke is just a sensitive woman who likes to eat radishes when she’s not on stage as St. Vincent. Brownstein pushes Clarke who turns the tables, transforming into an overwhelming diva. Soon, Clarke is casting about for a more charismatic Brownstein. “You are in the narrative,” she explains. “I just want you played by someone… exquisite.” The two women wind up entrapped in their story.
Don’t Look Up, is a disaster film about a planet-killer comet. Humanity is given 6 months to save itself but squanders every opportunity. Of course, a sizable portion of Americans refuse to believe that there’s a comet threat at all. Egged on by a media more out to entertain than to inform, these deniers enable a demagogic president and Silicon Valley tycoon to risk the planet’s future on an attempt to mine the comet for rare earth minerals.
Social media plays an outsized role in this story. Online America is, of course, more concerned about the sexual desirability and media skills of the two scientists best informed about the killer comet. Their efforts to get the world to take the threat seriously and to deal with it are stymied not just by greed and political corruption but by society’s willingness to actively ignore inconvenient truths.
All three films offer no escape for their heroes. The problem of the Matrix has always been that freeing humanity would leave a bunch of atrophied and confused humans on a planet rendered inhospitable by decades of war against the machines. The machines and humans are entirely codependent for survival. There can’t be a “blow up the Death Star” moment and the needs or protagonists and antagonists are so intertwined.
In Don’t Look Up, McKay had choices, though the film about an asteroid strike averted has already been made a few times. It might have been narratively interesting if the billionaire’s scheme to mine the asteroid had succeeded. It might even have been a darker ending, as it would have left the tycoon in charge of a fortune worth hundreds of trillions and a world population turned compliant by his technological heroism.
The typical ending for a disaster style film, says McKay, is for human ingenuity to thwart the crisis. Think the asteroid in 1988’s Armageddon. McKay wants to warn us not to count on studio magic. Humanity will not alwatys overcome existential challenge. Except that it sometimes does and we’re not much better off for it. Consider The Cuban Missile Crisis. All life on Earth nearly ended and the logical response to that should have been to realize how close we came to the brink and to have eliminated nuclear weapons. Instead, the severity of the crisis was downplayed and the aversion of a catastrophic third World War was used to argue in favor of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction as a reasonable preventative measure against nuclear annihilation. By surviving, we learned the wrong lessons.
It’s hard to see clearly from within your own narrative. Some are imposed on us by media or capitalism, others by our personalities or emotions, and all deceive us. Art can overcome this, but to be effective, art needs distribution and attention, both of which are controlled by media and technology conglomerates. Put another way, it’s worrisome that Warner Brothers can pressure Lana Wachowski into directing a new Matrix movie and that the company doesn’t care when she satirizes them for it. It’s all about power. Which is why Don’t Look Up ends the way it does.
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Ever wonder how stars like Jay-Z build and keep their wealth? Zack O'Malley Greenburg spent a decade researching such fortunes for Forbes (while authoring books like Empire State of Mind and A-List Angels). Now he's writing the Zogblog—a weekly newsletter on the intersection of music, media and money—and serializing his next book, We Are All Musicians Now, via Substack. Click here to get both for free.