The Matrix trilogy
In my Hollywood travels, I am often asked to adapt this or that popular work of fantasy. When doing this, what I need to do first is remove the metaphor and see if the story still works.
For instance:
A few years back, they asked me to adapt Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy for the American movie screen. The story of Astroboy is: a brilliant scientist’s son dies in a car wreck and so the brilliant scientist spends all his company’s money and resources to build a robot replica of the son. The robot looks and acts like his little boy but, much to the scientist’s chagrin, does not grow. Well of course it doesn’t grow, it’s a robot. So the scientist, filled with rage and self-hatred (and not feeling quite so brilliant any more), sells the robot to a robot circus.
Now then: we don’t have little-boy robots in this world, so I had to think what Astroboy was a metaphor for.
What I came up with is this: a man has a son, and the son dies, so the man has another son, and is disappointed and outraged that the second son does not turn out to be a good replacement for the first son. So he turns his back on the second son, unable to love him.
What would this spurned second son do? He doesn’t know what he has done to incur his father’s disappointment. He doesn’t even know that there was a first son. The second son, it occurred to me, would do everything in his power in order to gain the thing that the first son got just by being born: his father’s love. In the case of a real-life little boy, that would mean working hard, overcoming grief and hardship in order to become the best he could possibly be. In the case of Astroboy, it would have to mean nothing less than saving the world from, I don’t know, a mad scientist’s evil robot or something. Astroboy would have to become the most powerful entity on the planet, all in the hopes of gaining his father’s love.
Anyway, that’s how I got the job writing the Astroboy screenplay. (That movie, the reader will surely be aware, didn’t get made. Such is life.)
The Matrix has a wonderful, daring, innovative screenplay, a killer hook and a terrific metaphor. (It also has probably the best tag-line I’ve ever heard in a movie trailer: Lawrence Fishburne intoning “Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what the Matrix is; you have to experience it for yourself.”)
Neo is convinced that something is not right with this world. That “something not right” turns out to be (spoiler alert) that the world we know is actually a vast computer simulation, created in order to distract us from the fact that we are actually living in tubs of pink goo and powering the machines that actually rule the world.
That’s the killer hook. And you know what? I’m going to bet that it turns out that, in reality, the world we know is not actually a vast computer simulation, and that we do not actually live in tubs of pink goo. The Matrix, then, is the metaphor.
A metaphor for what? Well, you know, the corporate machine, that all-consuming, media-driven monster that has us surrounded, gets us from every possible angle and keeps us so amused, confused and abused that we willingly give our lives to it. That thing. How shall we behave in this world? How can we balance our desire to be free with our need to be a part of the world? Can we “free our minds” from this pervasive corporate monster? What happens if we “unplug” from the world? What would we find “out there?” Will we be happier? These are the real, everyday, pertinent questions The Matrix had to offer its audience.
(This is the same metaphor used in the Alien movies, the corporate culture that would rather invite a rapacious, heartless monster intothe world rather than pass up an opportunity for profit.)
The good folks who made The Matrix, unsurprisingly, found themselves with a substantial hit on their hands and decided to make two more movies based in the same world back to back. Why not? The world created in The Matrix is fascinating and well-worth the time spent investigating it. The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, while not as fluid dramatically as the first movie, are still visually stunning and philosophically complex. The action sequences are nothing less than stupefying and the dense intellectual underpinnings are, well, they’re dense enough that this viewer has had to watch the movies three times in order to begin to grasp just what the hell some of the characters are talking about.
And there’s where I think the problem lies, why the second two movies fail to engage on the same level as the first. The second two movies take place in a world so fascinating that the fimmakers decided to abandon their metaphor, and make a movie about the imaginary world. Or rather, the filmmakers’ ambitions are so vast that they decided (or planned all along) to expand their metaphor of late-corporate media culture to include philosophical notions of the nature of human life so vast and complex that they appear to be all-but opaque, and certainly uncinematic. To get around this problem, they include action sequences of mind-boggling immensity and plot twists startling in their ordinariness (the bumbling recruit who saves the day, the hot-shot pilot who bucks staggering odds to get her ship to dock, the Mexican standoff with the effete, sneering Frenchman). The action sequences demand to be seen again and again, and in between one can begin to make sense of long, motionless scenes about “systemic anomalies.”
This is the same problem I have with Dune or Lord of the Rings — I can’t locate the metaphor in these works. I know other people, many other people apparently, do not have this problem. But as for me, I’m not interested in the vast complexity of an imaginary world, I’m interested in this world. I attend a drama so that I might better understand how to live my life; what do the second two Matrix movies offer in this regard?
