When classifying a movie in a genre it is impossible to be anything other than to be so general that it is tantamount to saying nothing. By bending and recombining genres like science fiction, martial arts, action, western, and noir, every cut, every edit in The Matrix is a thin, crooked, intersecting, blurry or non-existent line between them. That allows The Matrix to defy even the most general classification as a pastiche of the different elements that let films within those genres say something. The Matrix could easily be dismissed as a sophisticated Frankenstein experiment in form if it was not so well prosecuted and did not exist in superposition with a well told story, with real characters, motivations, and emotional stakes. All the necessary parts of genuine drama. Which is the sauce and which is the rice, anyone can say. Instead we can say… What a film. Quelle film. We will not talk about the sequels.
Neo’s progress towards liberation as a character in the world described in the film is paralleled by the movie itself in the greater world of cinema, breaking out of the conventions of the film genres that might otherwise define it. Neo takes small steps at first but the film builds to set piece action sequences that are in open defiance of cinematic law. It plays first with the superficial, more visible constructs in cinema and gradually works its way down to manipulating its source code as represented by literally exactly that.
The audience’s re-education begins at the same time as Neo’s in the construct, a blank page, a tabula rasa, where he has the power to upload features from different genres and begin building anything they want from first principles. Accompanied by a fittingly decontextualized exposition dump from Morpheus, the freedom, the blankness is initially terrifying and painful to neo. After a training montage which includes a miniature kung-fu scene, he finally comes to terms with the power and his first willful command is: “Guns. Lots of guns.” If only for the sake of brevity and to be consistent with Neo’s summation of the action genre, we will talk about the bullets as one of the most simple subverted tropes. Only one part, and hope it can stand for the whole.
Possibly the most persistent component of a genre category is the unspoken but open secret of action movies, a pact with the audience, that the main characters cannot be shot by anyone for the sake of the plot until the right contrived time, if at all. This is sometimes called “plot armor” but reaches the lowest depths of what we can call “patheticism” while it still grasps at realism. But in The Matrix the antagonists within the construct that can’t exist outside of it, the agents, perform caricatured dodges of bullets that are consistent with plot armor, but uncanny in their appearance because of the rejection of any attempt at realism. They are emergent from the form and masters of it. It serves as a parody of the action genre we are all familiar with. Bullets graze Neo at first but evading them completely is a skill he gradually learns as he becomes the action hero.
The audience’s re-education is complete when we eventually have granted the wish that we have always secretly wanted. The bullets land emphatically. Neo is killed, in the ultimate denial of even that most commonly understood silent cliche that the hero can’t be shot. Then Neo is unkilled in the same sequence in the ultimate denial of a competing cliche, that a character is only dead if we see them get shot. This is a switch in the irreducible binaries of film itself. On or off. Alive or dead. Neo can see this code at the same moment that the audience can, and can not only dodge bullets, but stop them at will.
The Matrix is a question. Can you simultaneously destroy the orthodoxy of film and engage with it on the levels that make it appealing in the first place? Can you present the disarticulated seemingly different aspects of cinema so effectively that any apparent contrast dissolves, that there is no clash, and they really do stand for the whole? It is also its own answer: Yes. Described with its own symbolism and in folding any cry of individualism, any scream from their living dissection by any character, story, or genre expressed in the film back into itself, The Matrix is staring at your own reflection in Morpheus’ glasses and simultaneously taking the red and blue pills. Only in order to better show us that the conventions of film are necessary tools that we must learn to use in order to better be free of them. To wake us up in order to witness the barren and meaningless sub structure of cinema but also to deliver us to build our own authentic meaning on top of that ground truth, and it does so first by liberating us from the conventions, the tropes, and the cliches that few people ever really want to be free of.
Matthew Cameron 
When classifying a movie in a genre it is impossible to be anything other than to be so general that it is tantamount to saying nothing. By bending and recombining genres like science fiction, martial arts, action, western, and noir, every cut, every edit in The Matrix is a thin, crooked, intersecting, blurry or non-existent line between them. That allows The Matrix to defy even the most general classification as a pastiche of the different elements that let films within those genres say something. The Matrix could easily be dismissed as a sophisticated Frankenstein experiment in form if it was not so well prosecuted and did not exist in superposition with a well told story, with real characters, motivations, and emotional stakes. All the necessary parts of genuine drama. Which is the sauce and which is the rice, anyone can say. Instead we can say… What a film. Quelle film. We will not talk about the sequels.
Neo’s progress towards liberation as a character in the world described in the film is paralleled by the movie itself in the greater world of cinema, breaking out of the conventions of the film genres that might otherwise define it. Neo takes small steps at first but the film builds to set piece action sequences that are in open defiance of cinematic law. It plays first with the superficial, more visible constructs in cinema and gradually works its way down to manipulating its source code as represented by literally exactly that.
The audience’s re-education begins at the same time as Neo’s in the construct, a blank page, a tabula rasa, where he has the power to upload features from different genres and begin building anything they want from first principles. Accompanied by a fittingly decontextualized exposition dump from Morpheus, the freedom, the blankness is initially terrifying and painful to neo. After a training montage which includes a miniature kung-fu scene, he finally comes to terms with the power and his first willful command is: “Guns. Lots of guns.” If only for the sake of brevity and to be consistent with Neo’s summation of the action genre, we will talk about the bullets as one of the most simple subverted tropes. Only one part, and hope it can stand for the whole.
Possibly the most persistent component of a genre category is the unspoken but open secret of action movies, a pact with the audience, that the main characters cannot be shot by anyone for the sake of the plot until the right contrived time, if at all. This is sometimes called “plot armor” but reaches the lowest depths of what we can call “patheticism” while it still grasps at realism. But in The Matrix the antagonists within the construct that can’t exist outside of it, the agents, perform caricatured dodges of bullets that are consistent with plot armor, but uncanny in their appearance because of the rejection of any attempt at realism. They are emergent from the form and masters of it. It serves as a parody of the action genre we are all familiar with. Bullets graze Neo at first but evading them completely is a skill he gradually learns as he becomes the action hero.
The audience’s re-education is complete when we eventually have granted the wish that we have always secretly wanted. The bullets land emphatically. Neo is killed, in the ultimate denial of even that most commonly understood silent cliche that the hero can’t be shot. Then Neo is unkilled in the same sequence in the ultimate denial of a competing cliche, that a character is only dead if we see them get shot. This is a switch in the irreducible binaries of film itself. On or off. Alive or dead. Neo can see this code at the same moment that the audience can, and can not only dodge bullets, but stop them at will.
The Matrix is a question. Can you simultaneously destroy the orthodoxy of film and engage with it on the levels that make it appealing in the first place? Can you present the disarticulated seemingly different aspects of cinema so effectively that any apparent contrast dissolves, that there is no clash, and they really do stand for the whole? It is also its own answer: Yes. Described with its own symbolism and in folding any cry of individualism, any scream from their living dissection by any character, story, or genre expressed in the film back into itself, The Matrix is staring at your own reflection in Morpheus’ glasses and simultaneously taking the red and blue pills. Only in order to better show us that the conventions of film are necessary tools that we must learn to use in order to better be free of them. To wake us up in order to witness the barren and meaningless sub structure of cinema but also to deliver us to build our own authentic meaning on top of that ground truth, and it does so first by liberating us from the conventions, the tropes, and the cliches that few people ever really want to be free of.
Share this: