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The Matrix on videotape
Monday, September 27 1999
The weak ones of the shifting ethic are packing up.
from "Much Better, Mr. Buckles," Guided by Voices, 1999.
On Friday the VP of System Architecture told me he was resigning. Today he was officially gone. Then later today his chief henchman announced that he too would be history, no longer to collect his unfathomably vast paycheck. The whole "new architecture" effort seems to have suddenly fizzled and died, exactly as everyone with any sense had predicted four months ago. The moral of this story is that no matter how much money you have, you can't hire a group of hot shot architects and expect them to level and rebuild a funky old medieval city in the course of a single season. I'm pleased by the inherent justice manifest in this turn of events, though I'm dismayed by all the wasted time and money. Shame on the arrogance of the management!
Tonight, Kim rented The Matrix on videotape. She also made chicken parmagiana for dinner. What's more, she bought five bottles of a rather fine wine. [REDACTED]
Since it first came out back in the Spring, everyone has been telling me that the Matrix is an incredible movie with breathtaking special effects and that I had to, at my earliest possible convenience, smoke some pot and go see it. So today I finally did, albeit in a format modified for my screen, and under the influence of three different simultaneous intoxicants.
This movie, what with its big budget and possibly intriguing premise, had a real potential for the male-action version of greatness. But though I was dazzled by the special effects (even those involving the gratuitous use of white boy martial arts) the movie really lacked something. For starters, some of the budget should have been spent on some sort of science advisor. If the movie is going to make an attempt at being science fiction (and thus, in a way, partly educational), the science should have some sort of self-consistent logic. The goofy explanation for why the robots bothered to keep humans around and continue to grow them in vats made no sense at all. These folks were generating bio-electricity? Come on! You still have to feed them something, and where is the energy coming from to put calories in their intravenous food as they languish in their pods? Supposedly there's no solar energy any more because "the sky was burned away." But if that's keeping away the sun, then there's no way to generate the food the humans are going to need to generate their "bio-electricity." Thermodynamics is a very fundamental discipline, guys! By way of comparison, the science was much better in the Terminator, Total Recall and even Star Wars (all of them pillaged for ideas in the Matrix). It's movies like the Matrix that contribute to the widespread problem of scientific illiteracy in this country. In this case, the science was actually so bad that it ruined my ability to fully appreciate the movie.
That said, parts of the movie were definitely excellent. I won't soon forget the scene where our hero awakes from his computer-induced Schteveish dream world to find himself in a gothic hell of nutrient pods. Furthermore, I found some subjects surprisingly well explored, particularly the psychological issue concerning the nature of reality and, perhaps more importantly, whether we actually want to know the true nature of reality.
I hardly noticed, but the acting was uniformly weak, with the exception of that one computer-generated enforcer dude/stylish übervillain. He was was absolutely chilling as the ultimately ruthless no-nonsense bureaucrat.
More than anything else, the Matrix seemed to be about the style of semi-goth urban coolness. It's good it was released before the Littleton shootings; what with all its trenchcoats and "guns, lotsa guns," it would have been unreleaseable afterwards.
After the movie, we were watching 20-20 and one of the stories was about a sort of small-scale redneck trailer park Matrix, if you will. Some scruffy working class guy managed to keep his platonic female housemate drugged on wild animal tanquilizer, convincing her she had a serious mental illness. Whenever she was passed out, he'd rape her and make videotapes. All she knew about it was that something was "kind of wrong" with her and that her vagina was perpetually torn up.
I'm shocked by the unexpected scientific ignorance being demonstrated by some of my readers. With all due respect to those writing to tell me that in the Matrix it's all quite simple, that the dead are fed back to the living and that's how the "human power plant" system works, I have to say
You fail the thermodynamics aptitude test!
If you accept that such a system can really function, let alone generate electricity, then you also believe in perpetual motion machines such as the Ultrajuice™. Energy doesn't just "happen" when it shuffles from one place to another, it is conserved. If energy is to be taken out of a system, it must also be put into the system. Feeding a population of organisms its dead is not a sustainable model. Frankly, I'm embarrassed to find myself having to point this out.
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