How “The Matrix” Changed the Way We Think About Reality
The movie that gave all of us a new way to see (or reject) everything.
It has been 23 years since The Matrix popularized the idea that reality is an illusion and that we are all actually lying in pods of fluid, serving as nutrients for machines. It sounds fantastical to most people — typical science fiction — but there are certain scientists and philosophers who believe that The Matrix, along with the long-awaited sequel The Matrix Resurrections, raises some serious questions of whether we really are living in a computer simulation.
So, are we? You take the blue pill and the article ends. You close the website and go back to descaling the kettle. You take the red pill and you keep on reading and Rizwan Virk, computer scientist and author of The Simulation Hypothesis, will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The Matrix, a philosophy movie disguised as an action movie about a computer programmer who learns that machines run the world and everyone is asleep inside of a digital simulation, changed movie things irrevocably.
The Matrix was the first shot fired in what’s now considered a benchmark year for American movies — 1999, the year that brought us Being John Malkovich and Magnolia, The Sixth Sense and Office Space, Fight Club and The Blair Witch Project and Election. And although few would claim it was the best of the bunch, it has worked its way into our thinking — for better and, unmistakably, for worse — as few other pieces of pop culture have done. We may talk about all those other movies. But Morpheus was right. In 2023, we may be living in the Matrix.
Or, you know, maybe we’re not. Maybe in 2023, we just like to say things like “We are living in the Matrix” — and that may be the truest and deepest influence of a movie whose high-flown paranoia has insinuated itself into the way we live now.
“What is reality?” but from “What if we’re living in a broken simulation?,” The Matrix is omnipresent — amazingly so, given how little we still talk about the actual movie. It’s not that the film was prescient. It didn’t anticipate our world. But it anticipated — and probably created — a new way of viewing that world.
What is the matrix?
The Matrix centers on the concept that the known world is an illusion. It follows the story of a character called Neo.
All his life Neo has realized that there is something not quite right with the world he sees around him. The explanations given don’t quite fit the facts. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that the year is not somewhere in the late 1990s, as everyone believes, but the late 2190s.
The world as we know it has been destroyed in a war between human beings and machines with artificial intelligence. Humans built the machines in the early 21st century. And now, in a nuclear-winter-like setting in which these machines are deprived of sunlight as an energy source, they have enslaved the human race and are farming people as a source of bioelectrical energy.
The humans are kept in an unconscious state in podlike containers in a vast holding field, plugged in to a central computer. In this nightmarish scenario, everything in the world — cars, buildings, cities and countries — are part of a complex computer-generated virtual reality called the Matrix, within which the humans interact.
Everything they see, smell and hear is part of this virtual construct and doesn’t really exist. A computer program merely stimulates their brains and deceives them into believing that they are all living normal 20th-century lives — eating, sleeping, working and interacting together. They are all blinded to the truth about how and why they exist.
But a handful of people have escaped from the Matrix and know the truth.
One of these, a man called Morpheus, hacks into the Matrix and contacts Neo, telling him: “The world you see is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. . . . Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”
Morpheus then presents Neo with two pills and asks him to make a choice. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. Take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
The quest for truth
The movie’s core theme examines the idea that people can be blinded to the truth about their existence, unable to know any better. They search but are unable to see the truth through the illusion that the world before them portrays.
“There is something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
As Morpheus tells Neo, “You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life — that there is something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
When we attempt to think about the nature of our existence, about why we are here, the myriad complexities of life often stop us before we start. Life is just too complicated. How do we know what is real and what is simply illusion brought on by our subjective view of the world? How can we be objective about the universe we live in when we can understand it only through the five physical senses?
Is it possible that we could be blinded about why we exist?
Are we, like the people held captive in the Matrix, oblivious to why we are here? Have we been deceived into believing that the physical reality around us is all there really is to life? Or is there something more? Is it possible that humankind really is being held captive? What is the truth?
This are questions that may have very different answers depending on your knowledge, understanding, values and life. But our take is that The Matrix’s thing. It was not an adventure or a lark but a manifesto.
Its adherents mined it for ideology and info, then discarded the husk. And what they took from the movie — what makes The Matrix’s long tail so long and so unusual — was a negative. The Matrix did not offer its disciples the joy of discovering a new reality but rather the empowerment of nullification — of casting off whatever temporal, physical, practical, or apparent reality doesn’t suit you.
The film gives everyone the authority to say This isn’t happening. But all it has to offer in response is a pronouncement that, as cold comfort goes, could have been drawn directly from The Sopranos.
