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Sakarja posted:The Matrix is not an example of a "correct film", it's an example of a film that actually supports a certain ("revolutionary") reading. This is a mistaking of content for form and of message for medium. So as long as there is the content 'human freedom of choice', the film 'supports a revolutionary reading' - even if the form of this free choice is (in Matrix) 'The Free Marketplace of Ideas'. This logic culminates in the ridiculous end of Matrix 3 where, with the 'totalitarian' Smith eliminated, people can freely choose between global capitalism or the apocalypse. This is, of course, a false choice. The name 'Revolutions' is inapt.
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Mar 22, 2015 02:41
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I really enjoyed this movie. You might not like it if you don't "get" what Die Antwoord is about. Their whole act is much easier to understand if you've been following them since MaxNormal.TV. They've been dropping hints in their lyrics about this flick since 2012. Earlier in the film, it's pretty obvious that neither of them are trained actors. When they act through scenes together though, it's pretty clear that they've got chemistry. They've got a kid together, after all.
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Mar 22, 2015 07:24
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:Has there been any discussion about the choice to cast Die Antwoord? They don't seem popular enough to be stunt casting, and they also don't seem like they can act. I've heard that they were a pain in the rear end and that Blomkamp wouldn't work with them again, which leaves me to wonder what the thought process was behind it in the first place. Was he just a big of theirs or something? This might be late, but here's an interview with Ninja on the matter. quote:"So just to be super clear, all the rumors about my 'terrible behavior' on set was written by 1 south african journalist, who has written many tabloid-style diss features on Die Antwoord (over the last 3 years) before his big Chappie feature. I have no idea who this dude is, but he seems to have a lil problem with us. some of his other features were called: 'DIE ANTWOORD - NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT' and 'DIE ANTWOORD - SOUTH AFRICA'S WORST NIGHTMARE" Might be true, given their history with national public outrage.
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Mar 22, 2015 07:33
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Sakarja posted:That imagery has been taken into account in my reading. Max is changed when he is "exposed" to technology that is capable of changing human nature. His choices or ethical stance have very little to do with it. Your reading of the film is correct in really broad terms, but I'm not sure why technology determining human nature, you know, Historical Materialism, Marx's core theme, is somehow not Marxist. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 09:16
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Effectronica posted:There is nothing to suggest that the central computer is anything more than a way to automate tasks. It is necessary to the course of the movie, but all the tasks it performs could be replaced by people. It merely alters the material conditions in the same way any change in productive factors alters them. You seem to be arguing in favor of an incredibly rigid definition of revolution mainlu to disqualify Elysium, and the way you jump around between arguments suggests your objection exists on a deeper level. Again, you fail to see the forest for the trees. Skynet controls the entire political system and determines the class structure. That is why it and it alone can enforce human equality. No person could ever do that. That is what Elysium tells us. In doing so, it rules out human (mass) action as a viable means to achieve meaningful, lasting change. That task must ultimately be left to machines unencumbered by the deficiencies inherent in human nature. SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is a mistaking of content for form and of message for medium. As I said before, you are getting distracted by the fact that The Matrix is not literal. And I left the sequels out of it for a reason. I guess you could argue that that is impermissible, but I would have to disagree. Hodgepodge posted:Your reading of the film is correct in really broad terms, but I'm not sure why technology determining human nature, you know, Historical Materialism, Marx's core theme, is somehow not Marxist. I think there is a larger disagreement here concerning Historical Materialism. But this thread is hardly the place for it. The problem is that Elysium's emphasis on technology goes so for as to render class struggle insufficient and, ultimately, irrelevant.
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Mar 22, 2015 13:05
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Sakarja posted:Again, you fail to see the forest for the trees. Skynet controls the entire political system and determines the class structure. That is why it and it alone can enforce human equality. No person could ever do that. That is what Elysium tells us. In doing so, it rules out human (mass) action as a viable means to achieve meaningful, lasting change. That task must ultimately be left to machines unencumbered by the deficiencies inherent in human nature. No, it doesn't. People built it and programmed it to accept certain people as citizens in order to save the labor necessary to do what the central computer does. They, however, defined who a citizen is in the first place. It's a tool. At the climax of the film, the tool is turned against its makers by the dispossessed and the criminal, reduced down to single persons because this is not some sort of neo-socialist realist piece. As a consequence, class lines are eliminated (or, rather, will be fully eliminated shortly after the film concludes) because the state has been obsoleted and the means and ends of production have been distributed to all. I don't know where you're getting "human nature" from this anyhow, as the central computer could still be reprogrammed, because it has not suddenly become intelligent, unlike Skynet. Equality will only remain as long as people want it to exist. That this is not emphasized in the ending is because it's not an issue- the weak, the dispossessed, they will not suddenly become tyrants given the fruits of their labors.
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Mar 22, 2015 13:58
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Sakarja posted:Again, you fail to see the forest for the trees. Skynet controls the entire political system and determines the class structure. That is why it and it alone can enforce human equality. No person could ever do that. That is what Elysium tells us. In doing so, it rules out human (mass) action as a viable means to achieve meaningful, lasting change. That task must ultimately be left to machines unencumbered by the deficiencies inherent in human nature. How is class struggle anything but a struggle over technology? That's literally what the "means of production" are- the technology which determines the material circumstances which permit the production, susitence, and reproduction of a community. Elysium represents this symbolically, but the underlying metaphor is as much a hypothetical example as it is a literary device. It's also a politically relevant comment on a society which expects technology to solve all of our peoblems. The singularity happens and the result is nothing but fat entitled babies and an ocean of the dispossessed. Even with the teleological assumption granted, it still takes a revolutionary act to realize the promise of a better world inherent in modernity. Because the singularity, insofar as it is a culmination of human knowledge which provides humanity with the resources necessary give each and every human and every human a dignified life, happened around 1820 or so. Even if this reaches the point where all that needs to be done is the press of a button, someone will still have to fight tooth and nail to do so.
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Mar 22, 2015 16:06
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Sakarja posted:As I said before, you are getting distracted by the fact that The Matrix is not literal. And I left the sequels out of it for a reason. I guess you could argue that that is impermissible, but I would have to disagree. Not actually. You mustn't conflate "a film that doesn't depict a revolution literally" and "a film that, literally, does not depict a revolution". Matrix does not depict a revolution. What you see in the sequel(s) is a step up to the level of Metropolis - where an you end with a the killing of the diabolical villain and a liberal handshake-agreement that those in charge will treat the workers better. The sequel(s) simply reenact the killing of Smith on a larger scale - magnifying the failures of the original film. Neo stages a big spectacle of revolution so that the capitalist order can survive.
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Mar 22, 2015 18:30
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Effectronica posted:No, it doesn't. People built it and programmed it to accept certain people as citizens in order to save the labor necessary to do what the central computer does. They, however, defined who a citizen is in the first place. It's a tool. At the climax of the film, the tool is turned against its makers by the dispossessed and the criminal, reduced down to single persons because this is not some sort of neo-socialist realist piece. As a consequence, class lines are eliminated (or, rather, will be fully eliminated shortly after the film concludes) because the state has been obsoleted and the means and ends of production have been distributed to all. Once more you are refuting claims I have never made and retreading ground we have already covered. Skynet can enforce either equality or inequality. This does not in any way change the fact that it is only Skynet that can enforce equality. To include even the slightest suggestion of a mass movement involved in a struggle would not automatically entail socialist realism. That is just silly. The caste distinction is eliminated in so far as the untouchables are inserted into the ruling caste (I don't care about fanfiction). The state has not been obsoleted to the extent that it lives on through Skynet. Elysium does not concern itself with the fate of the means of production - this omission is telling in itself - nor would an immediate redistribution to "all" support a Marxist reading. This appears to be the source of all the confusion. Skynet is capable of overriding human nature, that is the important part. The fact that it can also do otherwise is perfectly obvious and completely irrelevant. What exactly would prevent the formerly dispossessed from turning against each other, in the absence of Skynet? Hodgepodge posted:How is class struggle anything but a struggle over technology? That's literally what the "means of production" are- the technology which determines the material circumstances which permit the production, susitence, and reproduction of a community. It seems like we are largely in agreement here. The only important point of contention is the conclusion. Elysium's Skynet is not analogous to a hammer, a factory or a power plant. Unlike the conventional means of production, Skynet actually appropriates virtually all of the struggle's functions. What is left could just as well be accomplished entirely by accident. It could be a technical malfunction or a human error. What does this tell us about the relative importance of human agency (and struggle) and the technology involved? SuperMechagodzilla posted:Not actually. You mustn't conflate "a film that doesn't depict a revolution literally" and "a film that, literally, does not depict a revolution". Matrix does not depict a revolution. The Matrix depicts an incitement to mass struggle, and does not depict the end of the struggle. The end of the film is simply the end of the film.
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Mar 22, 2015 21:33
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Skynet sure has a busy film career. He was pretty good in Alien as Muther.
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Mar 22, 2015 21:56
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Sakarja posted:The Matrix depicts an incitement to mass struggle, and does not depict the end of the struggle. The end of the film is simply the end of the film. Once again, it is the form that is important. The form of the 'struggle' in the Matrix, which Neo attempts to incite, is the struggle to deregulate the market so that "left to their own rational devices, free individuals [will] have the discerning capacity to sift through competing proposals in an open environment of deliberation and exchange, allowing truth, or the best possible results, to be realized in the end." SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 22:09
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Sakarja posted:It seems like we are largely in agreement here. The only important point of contention is the conclusion. Elysium's Skynet is not analogous to a hammer, a factory or a power plant. Unlike the conventional means of production, Skynet actually appropriates virtually all of the struggle's functions. What is left could just as well be accomplished entirely by accident. It could be a technical malfunction or a human error. What does this tell us about the relative importance of human agency (and struggle) and the technology involved? I dunno, your objection seems more akin to the rejection of "machine mentality" created by a society dependent on AIs in Herbert's Dune than on anything I primarily associate with Marxism. I suppose there is a potential literal danger in turning to hypothetical AIs, in that such a society might deprive humans of the natural and fulfilling labor of politics, science, etc. Of course, we already choose to organize society in a way which does this, and dress this up as, for example, "the market." AI is being used as a metaphor here, however. It is a plot device used to put the emphasis on the human struggle precisely by representing the choice between socialism and capitalism as an immediate a struggle between competing class interests which is resolved entirely in human terms rather than as a technocratic conundrum on which we are awaiting an answer. Ultimately, the "AI" represents society's capacity for intellectual and technocratic labour anyhow. We already have artificial technocratic systems with which control our resource allocation. We don't need a better one, we need to use the ones we have ethically. In practice, you seem to be actually asking for a movie that is more about the technocratic solution rather than less, but the movie uses technology as a hand-wave precisely to imply that the technical details can and do function as distractions from the human act of revolution. Especially in a narrative, where they symbolic rather than literal systems and machines.
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Mar 23, 2015 02:24
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Just to underline the point, here is Neo's speech at the end of Matrix: "I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world … without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you." The first thing to ask: who is Neo talking to, that he can finally feel 'out there?' Naturally, he is delivering a message to the Reptilian Lizard-King, the alien Brain-God - the 'Other of the Other'. "The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is the most succint definition of paranoia, so that, two features which characterize today's ideological stance cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy are strictly codependent: today's typical subject, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. Distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject's refusal to 'take it seriously,' relies on the belief that there is an 'Other of the Other,' a secret, invisible, all-powerful agent who effectively 'pulls the strings' behind the visible, public Power. This other, obscene, invisible power structure acts the part of the 'Other of the Other' in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life)." -Zizek In a very straightforward way, Neo's message to the Lizard-King serves to re-enforce the Matrix (which is the symbolic order that regulates social life). Neo retreats from radical antagonism of class struggle, to blame the theft of society on the Reptilian plot. This is not some abstract, theoretical distinction. Neo vows to "show these people ... a world without you." So: what do you call a version of 1999 where the universe is not under the control of a Reptilian cabal? It is, of course, the actual year 1999 that actually took place, in our universe, 16 years ago. So let's do exactly as Neo says and travel back to 1999, to show those people (Morpheus lists them as "businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters...") "a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries." The joke should be obvious: Bernie Madoff will look at this world and say "great!" Many of those people will invest in Pets.com, because the world of freedom without rules and boundaries is already precisely the world of global capitalism. And then: can anyone think of another film where a man in black trenchcoat uses his psychic powers to sense the fear in the alien Brain-God, gloating that "it's afraid!"? SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 04:58
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Once again, it is the form that is important. The form of the 'struggle' in the Matrix, which Neo attempts to incite, is the struggle to deregulate the market so that "left to their own rational devices, free individuals [will] have the discerning capacity to sift through competing proposals in an open environment of deliberation and exchange, allowing truth, or the best possible results, to be realized in the end." No, it is all perfectly straightforward. Neo is going to show people the truth and propose that they join him in the revolution. There is no suggestion of "free and fair competition in the marketplace of ideas". SuperMechagodzilla posted:Just to underline the point, here is Neo's speech at the end of Matrix: Neo's message to the Matrix is simply one of defiance. For the purposes of the film, he could have explained his intentions to Morpheus or Trinity or whoever. But this way it seems more "badass", which is obviously very important to the film. As for the supposed similarity to Starship Troopers' kitschy celebration of fascism, you are missing an important difference. Neo addresses the system directly, challenging it. The Gestapo man in Starship Troopers addresses the victorious stormtroopers in the presence of an already vanquished enemy. Hodgepodge posted:I dunno, your objection seems more akin to the rejection of "machine mentality" created by a society dependent on AIs in Herbert's Dune than on anything I primarily associate with Marxism. I suppose there is a potential literal danger in turning to hypothetical AIs, in that such a society might deprive humans of the natural and fulfilling labor of politics, science, etc. Of course, we already choose to organize society in a way which does this, and dress this up as, for example, "the market." My objection is not about any danger that AI would pose to humanity. The problem is the implication that mankind, in the absence of technology like Skynet, simply cannot "change its ways". This presents us with a hopeless situation where a revolution won't solve anything. Instead we have to wait around for technology, that is capable of saving us from ourselves, to be invented. It is a metaphor, but the emphasis is exactly the opposite. The technology is essential, human action is incidental. The other stuff (conflict between an underdog hero and evil villains, action sequences etc.) is necessary for Elysium to work as a sci-fi action film. But it is irrelevant to the central metaphor, and none of it is specifically Marxist in character. This cuts to the core of the issue. Elysium tells us that we are incapable of using the systems at our disposal ethically. Here, technology must intervene. The fact that humans invented the technology in the first place, and then "pressed the button", is unimportant. What matters is that the technology, once operational, is capable of overriding the problems inherent in human nature that we ourselves cannot cure. It is of no particular importance if this happens by accident or through conscious struggle. The former, however, would make for a terrible action film.
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Mar 23, 2015 12:16
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You seem to be making a distinction between pushing the button (or reprogramming the AI) and any other sort of work mediated by a machine. I'm not sure there's more behind it than "it's a sci-fi, so the technological element is non-literal." Like the real-world analogies being made are to health care and citizenship, where we simply need to push the button and make our existing system distribute resources differently. The obstructive human elements of the real system are more extensive, but it is simply the work of narrative to simplify this. But the essential labour being performed is to bypass as many of the obstructive elements as possible and then violently confront the hard core of that opposition, then reprogram the system. That's what a revolution is. Like, if we aren't capable of using our capabilities ethically, why is the outcome of the story that the protagonists alter human-made and managed systems to behave ethically? A human told the technology to behave ethically and it will do so until humans tell it to do otherwise. This is unlikely to happen because the change that has been made inherently changes the underlying power relationships involved. Just like it's very hard to undo universal health care legislation or reverse extensions of citizenship. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 13:56
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Got around to seeing this in the theater this weekend. Liked it, didn't love it. Some weird pacing issues that I think distracted from developing and getting close to the characters, but the movie settles into a much better rhythm in the second half. On the topic of capitalism, I thought Sigourney Weaver's character was a great takedown of the idea of capitalism even being efficient on its own terms. When Deon comes to her with an absolutely unprecedented development -- one that we eventually find out has implications of commodifiable eternal life -- she squashes it precisely because she plays by the rules of her own system. The insurance and paperwork prohibit it. It's an important balancing point against Hugh Jackman's character, whose transgressions could otherwise be dismissed by his willingness to break the law and his obvious sociopathy. Weaver is the opposite of this. She is rational, kind to her employees, and always follows the rules. Her only real act of callousness is in ordering Chappie's destruction, which is more a failure to accept that a robot could be a person rather than a product -- the opposite of Jackman, who both seems to immediately accept Chappie's autonomy and at the same time decide it's something that must be 'taught a lesson', tortured, and subjugated.
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Mar 23, 2015 17:52
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Hodgepodge posted:You seem to be making a distinction between pushing the button (or reprogramming the AI) and any other sort of work mediated by a machine. I'm not sure there's more behind it than "it's a sci-fi, so the technological element is non-literal." Yes, I see that as a distinction of fundamental importance. I see a machine that assumes (or appropriates) responsibility for the ethical dimension of human coexistence as something entirely different from a tool used in production or distribution. It is non-literal, but its significance still remains the same. It doesn't matter if it is depicted as Skynet or some kind of gizmo that rewrites the human genome. It would still serve the same function. Well, there is no such button to push in the real world. Any meaningful, lasting change for the better would require sustained, conscious mass action. Elysium rejects this line of reasoning in favor of a technological Hail Mary. This is by design, not by accident or oversight. Humans create and repurpose the technology, but in the end it is the technology that must be entrusted with the task of enforcing equality/ethical behavior in humans. Again, Spider could be replaced by an accident, Skynet could not. The technology is indispensable and not merely used for the sake of narrative economy. Let's say we take Skynet out of the picture. We simply replace president Patel with Spider and get rid of Carlyle, Delacourt and Kruger (or rather; what they represent in the system). In the absence of Skynet, this would not solve the problems facing humanity. Why is that? What is missing?
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Mar 23, 2015 22:24
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Sakarja posted:No, it is all perfectly straightforward. Neo is going to show people the truth and propose that they join him in the revolution. There is no suggestion of "free and fair competition in the marketplace of ideas". There's a familiar sitcom gag that I'm sure you've encountered before: a poor man, wishing to impress his girlfriend (perhaps to disguise some sort of silly lie), begins yelling angrily into his telephone - barking orders at some sort of unseen authority figure, acting like a big-shot. Of course, the phone isn't actually plugged in. You are putting forward a fairly obvious misreading of the end speech. Neo does not threaten to show 'those people' the truth but, rather, "a world where anything is possible." That is a fantasy world - a fantasy that we could do anything if it were not for that unseen agent holding us back. The Lizard-King, the person Neo is speaking to, does not exist at all - it is a fantasmic figure upon which all social ills can be blamed, masking the radical lack which exists at the level of the social itself. For the Nazis, these were 'the Jew'. For Stalin, the 'class-enemy'. For Starship Troopers, 'the Bug'... This was the satire in Prometheus: characters seeking things like immortality and resurrection of the dead got exactly that, in the only form it could take: a nightmare. Authentic freedom is not infinite possibility but the accepting the terrifying burden of responsibility - of traversing the fantasy, acting without any external guarantee from an Other because the Other does not exist. And this, finally, brings us back to Chappie. Like Chappie, Neo's actions do absolutely nothing to contradict the logic of capitalism. He not an anticapitalist revolutionary but an accelerationist who pushes the logic of capitalism to an extreme - total globalization, everyone uploaded to the Cloud... Not a Christ figure but a friendly demon. Chappie can, consequently, be read with profit as a satire of Matrix. Ninja is simply a more blatantly idiotic version of Morpheus - dragging our hero into the 'real world', teaching him martial arts, setting him loose on the slut who took daddy's car...
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Mar 23, 2015 23:10
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There's a familiar sitcom gag that I'm sure you've encountered before: a poor man, wishing to impress his girlfriend (perhaps to disguise some sort of silly lie), begins yelling angrily into his telephone - barking orders at some sort of unseen authority figure, acting like a big-shot. Of course, the phone isn't actually plugged in. Phones fill a specific function in The Matrix that is different from anything that usually happens in a sitcom. And we actually see the system trying to trace the call. Also, there is no punchline afterwards. Instead, Neo looks fairly frickin' cool while a badass RATM song plays. As for his speech, it seems like you're splitting hairs. Neo is clearly speaking the truth since he himself can in fact do anything. So he could show them all his cool tricks. And again, Neo is addressing the system, something that clearly exists in the film, not some shadowy cabal of lizard people.
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Mar 23, 2015 23:43
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Mechafunkzilla posted:It's an important balancing point against Hugh Jackman's character, whose transgressions could otherwise be dismissed by his willingness to break the law and his obvious sociopathy. Weaver is the opposite of this. She is rational, kind to her employees, and always follows the rules. Her only real act of callousness is in ordering Chappie's destruction, which is more a failure to accept that a robot could be a person rather than a product -- the opposite of Jackman, who both seems to immediately accept Chappie's autonomy and at the same time decide it's something that must be 'taught a lesson', tortured, and subjugated. She's kind of a lot like the Obama stand-in in Elysium, who is against the outright murder of the border-jumpers trying to get at their healthcare, but otherwise helps to maintain a system that is systemically violent and achieves very little. His characterisation is that he's so short-sighted that he's irrelevant, and both sides of the conflict see him this way but for very different reasons. It's the very basic criticism of democracy, that the current system can easily be twisted into a monstrous, possibly-fascist one in the name of maintaining/defending itself, and to stand against this one must develop a better system, rather than simply say 'let's not do that' and keep perpetuating things as they are. Sakarja posted:Phones fill a specific function in The Matrix that is different from anything that usually happens in a sitcom. And we actually see the system trying to trace the call. Also, there is no punchline afterwards. Instead, Neo looks fairly frickin' cool while a badass RATM song plays. The similarity between the phones doesn't matter - the point is they're superficially addressing some Other, saying 'me beat you!' to demonstrate victory, defiance, power, whatever. The Other doesn't exist - there is no 'actual' machine listening to everyone's calls and trying to trace them if you call them mean, even though diegetically there is. Like the machines in Elysium, they are metaphorical. The basic conceit of the film is that our supposed everyday lives are maintained by a shady cabal of bad guys that manipulate us to take away our will to revolt and feed on our essence. Neo is fighting Cultural Marxism. It is no surprise that, years after the fact, MRAs and the right-wing weirdoes that crossover with them in venn diagrams would call themselves 'red pills'. Neo dresses like a 'badass' to show off and look cool to all the dumb dumbs who don't know about the evil conspiracy. This is the central fantasy-image the whole film acts to hold up. He survives death, and gets to be a God. Woo! How nice for him. Meanwhile, Max in Elysium gets progressively more hurt, closer to death, sweatier, dirtier, broken down, and disoriented until he kills himself to make things actually better. He lives on, but only in the form of his actions and people's memories - as an authentic Christ figure. Not some baby who trades getting shot a bit for magic powers. I'm imagining a version of Elysium now where instead of Healthcare, FauxObama has the robots make and hand out trench coats and dark sunglasses to pacify the masses. No wait we basically already have that. What's in season this year? Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 02:09
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Sakarja posted:Phones fill a specific function in The Matrix that is different from anything that usually happens in a sitcom. And we actually see the system trying to trace the call. Also, there is no punchline afterwards. Instead, Neo looks fairly frickin' cool while a badass RATM song plays. There are several problems here. First, a system is not a person. Even as a metaphor, the idea of calling Capitalism Itself on the telephone and offering it a choice - "where we go from there is a choice I leave to you" - is ridiculous. The moment you 'personify' capitalism, you are not actually dealing with capitalism but with persons (real or imagined): 'rich people', 'The Illuminati', 'Reptilians', 'the class-enemy' and whatever. And again, this is a distraction from the Real of social antagonism (aka class struggle). The definition of the 'Other of the Other' is the Other who exists in the Real. So Neo is saying, straightforwardly, that class struggle is not a problem - that what Marxists identify as 'class struggle' is actually the Reptilian plot. That leads in to the second point. When the film's characters talk about 'the system', they are referring to the matrix - the virtual universe. But the matrix is not capitalism. It is, to repeat, the big Other - the symbolic order that structures reality for us. This is where the political/ideological fight takes place, but it is not the 'objective' economic system. The difference is actually clearly illustrated in the film: when Neo makes the phone call, the matrix freezes when he says the word "change". Numbers stop moving and the onscreen 'tracking program' crashes, leaving the message "SYSTEM FAILURE". So the question is the same as before: if the Matrix is paused, and the system has failed, who is reading the screen? Or, more to the point: who does Neo imagine there? For whom is he performing? The punchline of Matrix is, unfortunately, that there is no punchline. The idea that there's nobody on the other end of the line is too radical for it. But you get that joke in Blomkamp's films.
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Mar 24, 2015 02:35
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The joke there, though, is he says he wants to show "us" the real world, a world of infinite possibility. But the two are seperate; the former is a scorched wasteland where most of humanity are helpless prisoners and the latter their prison. So if humanity wants the infinite possibility he's promising, it has to maintain the Matrix, with the threat of confronting the "desert of the real" without the cocoon of fantasy. You're [e: Sakarja; this ended up reading as if I'm replying to SMG above] resisting the "libertarian" reading of the fantasy in the Matrix, but it is actually pretty explicit. The movie was released at the height of popular acceptance of libertarian fantasies, particularily in sci-fi, online culture, and cyberpunk. The X-Files was still fresh in people's memories, and iirc the X-Files movie was released within a few years of The Matrix. Oh and the face of the antagonists are Men in Black and they literally have a black helicopter in one scene. If you missed the connection there to paranoid right-wing fantasy, it is only because pop culture was so saturated with it at the that their boogymen were starring in everything from sci-fi action to Will Smith vehicles. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 07:57
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Hbomberguy posted:You're missing the point: Yes, with Smith gone the system itself is what remains for Neo to address. I guess he could call "Agent #2 whose name no one can remember", but that wouldn't make much sense. And yes, of course the system in The Matrix and Skynet in Elysium are both metaphors. It's strange that you would say that only to then immediately switch to a very literal reading. "Feeding on our essence" is as metaphor just like the system. And again, the Matrix is a sentient system, not a "shadowy cabal". It's actually capitalism. Although "Cultural Marxism" would make the interrogation scene really funny. It is also not something The Matrix can be held accountable for. Think of it this way, fascists have been appropriating socialist cultural expressions for as long as they have existed. It doesn't make the things involved retroactively fascistic. Throughout the ages, revolutionaries and radicals have often dressed conspicuously: Hats, leather jackets and hoodies, you name it. There is nothing strange about that. FauxObama in Elysium is actually president Patel, not Spider. Spider is a plucky freewheeling entrepreneur trying to bring private healthcare to the desperate people by circumventing Obamacare and its computerized death panel. SuperMechagodzilla posted:There are several problems here. Yet again you're being overly literal whenever it serves your purpose. It's like a twist on that joke by Kissinger; Who do I call if I want to call Capitalism. Except it's a film so Neo can actually do that. Also, the system can be sentient because it's a metaphor, not a literal representation of capitalism, ideology, false consciousness etc. How is he saying that? It seems more like the opposite. They fight both the system and the sewer-robots that defend it. I don't see the problem here. The system can't trace Neo the way it could with Trinity at the beginning of the film. If the system had failed completely, the city and everything in it would probably have disappeared. This is all really obvious stuff that should be easy to pick up on as long as you watch the film with an open mind.
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Mar 24, 2015 08:09
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Sakarja posted:Yet again you're being overly literal whenever it serves your purpose. It's like a twist on that joke by Kissinger; Who do I call if I want to call Capitalism. Except it's a film so Neo can actually do that. Also, the system can be sentient because it's a metaphor, not a literal representation of capitalism, ideology, false consciousness etc. Literalism has nothing to do with it. I am referring to the ideological effects of the form of the metaphor, rather than the content of the metaphor. Careful reading is important, because the generic defiance of 'free humans' against 'the machine' is the content of everything from Avatar to Iron Man to Star Wars to Pacific Rim to, yes, Starship Troopers. District 9, for example, ends with the reveal that half the footage you've been watching was leaked by a whistleblower and assembled, in the diegesis, by a documentary team. If you ignore all the non-diegetic shots, you are left with a fairly standard talking-head documentary about 'something that went wrong'. At the level of constituted ideology, this documentary does contain a critique of advanced capitalism: the aliens are shown living in squalor, the corporation is revealed to be conducting genetic experiments, etc. However, there is a non-constituted ideological effect. The radical, authentically utopian approach of Christopher and Wikus is (however unwittingly) omitted by the documentarians. Liberal gradualism, focusing on the whistleblower, becomes the message. This is another key difference from Matrix: "Utopia as simple imaginary impossibility (the utopia of a perfected harmonious social order without antagonisms, the consumerist utopia of today's capitalism), is not utopia in the more radical sense of enacting what, within the framework of the existing social relations, appears as 'impossible' - this second utopia is 'a-topic' only with regard to these relations." -Zizek Neo promises to show 'those people' a utopian world where anything is possible - and that is not a radical solution at all. He should show them, rather, the one thing that is impossible.
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Mar 24, 2015 23:28
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Hodgepodge posted:The joke there, though, is he says he wants to show "us" the real world, a world of infinite possibility. But is that not the very essence of revolution: The difference between utopia and the harsh, dreary post-revolutionary reality? "I'm going to show them a world where everything is possible, and then we're all going to spend the rest of our lives eating watery gruel in a sewer." Everything that's seemingly libertarian about The Matrix is just on the surface and not actually very important to our reading. So what if libertarian fantasies were popular at the time? All films have to take the prevailing mood and sentiment (of their target audience) into account if they are to be successful. They're bound to be influenced, if only through osmosis, since films don't exist in a vacuum. Similarly, Elysium is only superficially leftist. It explicitly deals with citizenship and healthcare. It seems to evoke the slogans of the Occupy movement. This is obviously because such things have been ubiquitous in pop culture since the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street. For the moment, they loom large in the popular imagination. As you say, it is only because pop culture is saturated with it. It doesn't really tell us very much about Elysium. The irony is that Elysium is far better suited to a libertarian reading than The Matrix. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Literalism has nothing to do with it. I am referring to the ideological effects of the form of the metaphor, rather than the content of the metaphor. Careful reading is important, because the generic defiance of 'free humans' against 'the machine' is the content of everything from Avatar to Iron Man to Star Wars to Pacific Rim to, yes, Starship Troopers. I don't know, it certainly seems like a pretty good way to get there. "Neo is calling someone. Who is he calling? Well, who could he be calling? You obviously can't call a computer, that's impossible. So he must be calling a person. That means a person must be in charge of the Matrix. Ergo, lizard illuminati." It's also important to keep in mind what phones are actually used for in The Matrix. Neo promises to show them a world without [the Matrix], something that would clearly have to be considered a radical break from existing social relations. But what's the point of showing them something that is impossible? Why should Neo taunt the people he is trying to recruit with something they can never have? Revolutionaries usually promise the people immediate improvements (things like land reform, control over the workplace, education and healthcare etc.). More fanciful imaginings of the future world to come are usually intended primarily for the intellectuals. Sakarja fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 10:00
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Sakarja posted:But is that not the very essence of revolution: The difference between utopia and the harsh, dreary post-revolutionary reality? "I'm going to show them a world where everything is possible, and then we're all going to spend the rest of our lives eating watery gruel in a sewer." There is always tension between the promise of a better world and the struggle required to obtain it. However, Neo is only promising the fantasy, the world where everything is possible. That corresponds to "opening people's minds" in the sense of presenting the utopian possibility of revolution, but also the Matrix as opposed to the "desert of the real." He's promising to show people that anything is possible within the system rather than the grim reality of the struggle at hand. He's already offering to compromise and allow the system to persist as long as humanity is offered a bigger slice of the pie. This corresponds to the outcome in Revolutions, where the status quo is maintained, except that Zion is allowed to "free" the minds of those humans who reject their place in the system and allow them into the conspiracy of those who have stepped "out of the cave" and now live "off the grid" preaching the truth. This was the compromise he was offering in the first place: Zion allowed to compete in the market of ideas, offering superpowers, secret knowledge, and a paranoid fantasy of oppression to the dissatisfied. This, of course, is just a refined version of Zion as another level of control, in which the revolution is co-opted as simply part of the system. Where he offering a real revolution, it would not be "post-revolutionary reality" which is "harsh" and "dreary," because an actually revolutionary populace is prepared for the challenges of a post-revolutionary reality by the even harsher challenges of the actual revolution. quote:Everything that's seemingly libertarian about The Matrix is just on the surface and not actually very important to our reading. So what if libertarian fantasies were popular at the time? All films have to take the prevailing mood and sentiment (of their target audience) into account if they are to be successful. They're bound to be influenced, if only through osmosis, since films don't exist in a vacuum. Similarly, Elysium is only superficially leftist. It explicitly deals with citizenship and healthcare. It seems to evoke the slogans of the Occupy movement. This is obviously because such things have been ubiquitous in pop culture since the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street. For the moment, they loom large in the popular imagination. As you say, it is only because pop culture is saturated with it. It doesn't really tell us very much about Elysium. The irony is that Elysium is far better suited to a libertarian reading than The Matrix. What exactly is "important to our reading" if not the symbols present in the text, and how those interact with the rest of the text, and the symbolic content of the culture of the creators and audience? There's no reason to handwave these things as some vague, unknowable process of "osmosis." Discussing them is exactly what the creation and analysis of film, as well as any other medium of communication, is. Like you seem to imply that Blompkamp gave little thought to using Occupy slogans other than "these are popular with the kids these days," or that there was no thought at all and he simply automatically used the symbols presented to him by the news cycle at that moment, and then went on to make the rest of the film as if the script were a Mad Libs and he had simply inserted an arbitrary element into one of the blanks. That's a rather bizarre theory of the creative process. The end result is that you seem to think that we should produce a reading in which Smith and the Agents being symbols straight out of libertarian-paranoid fantasy is simply window dressing, excluded from analysis as superficial. This seems to me special pleading for an exception to critical scrutiny for one of the central elements of the text. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 16:00
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Sakarja posted:But is that not the very essence of revolution: The difference between utopia and the harsh, dreary post-revolutionary reality? "I'm going to show them a world where everything is possible, and then we're all going to spend the rest of our lives eating watery gruel in a sewer." And there lies the Matrix's most debilitating fault: Morpheus is wrong. "When faced with a paranoid construction, we must not forget Freud's warning and mistake it for the 'illness' itself: the paranoid construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real 'illness', 'the end of the world', the breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of this substitute formation." -Zizek What Morpheus reveals as 'the real world' in Matrix is actually a product of the breakdown of symbolic reality, made bearable through the paranoid fantasy of the Machine/Reptilian conspiracy. Morpheus is on the edge of a psychotic breakdown, and is not coping well. The Matrix does not depict a simple opposition between 'first world' and 'third world'. It is, rather, an entire Earth - including a virtual 'third world' - contrasted with the nightmarish hallucination/mad prophecy of the future. In Edge Of Tomorrow (AKA Live Die Repeat), Tom Cruise begins to experience reality as if it were a videogame, but always 'resets' on some sort of nightmarish image of the walls being ripped apart by alien squid. That crumbling of the walls is psychosis.* Although Edge Of Tomorrow has some faults, it is more radical than Matrix because it presents the fact that there is no 'realer world' 'on the outside'. The film shows this by way of a Christian metaphor: Cruise's videogame power comes from being infected by 'demon blood' that essentially creates a save-state, granting him immortality and superpowers - but he is only freed when he receives a transfusion of normal, human blood. Without the power, he knows that he will die permanently - any changes he makes to the world will be permanent. He is finally free - authentically free to assume a terrifying burden of responsibility, without any guarantees. Freedom in the sense of working without a net. In a reality where anything was possible, nothing really mattered. Imagine living in the world of Grand Theft Auto, where you can blow up dozens of cars, kill people, and wake up in hospital the next day with everything restored. That's what Neo is after. For Neo to reach the level of Tom Cruise's character, he would have to return to the Matrix permanently - cutting all ties with the 'desert of the real' - and yet still retaining the full understanding of the burden of his responsibility. This may very well involve giving up his demonic power. As Zizek puts it, he should take the third pill: “The choice between the blue or the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course The Matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself. … I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake fast food religious experience, but a pill which would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion, but reality in illusion itself. … Our fundamental delusion today is not believing in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously – on the contrary, it is not taking fictions seriously enough.”-Zizek This is where District 9 comes in to play again, because it has the very same 'armies of drones from the future' as Matrix (and, more blatantly, Independence Day). But there is no conspiracy at the other side of the telephone/portal. There is no grand design - no leadership at all. There are no layers of reality, but different competing ideologies failing to deal with these alien Neighbors. The Christian lesson is that those bugs - disgusting, inhuman, lost creatures described as "workers who don't understand the concept of property" - are our very essence. And make no mistake: the drones in District 9 are the exact same bugs from Alien, Matrix, Edge Of Tomorrow, Starship Troopers, Terminator and so-on. The differences are entirely due to perception. *See also: Cabin In The Woods, and the apocalyptic threat posed by the 'Old Ones'. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 19:07
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Edit: I can't include quotes anymore since my posts already take up too much space as it is. Again, Neo is addressing the system itself when he promises to show the people "a world without you". So I don't understand what you mean by "within the system". It is the world without [the Matrix] where anything is possible. So it's explicitly the opposite of what you're saying. And it's not an offer of compromise; it's a challenge and a taunt: "your move/what are you going to do about it?" As I said before; it's a message of defiance. The Matrix depicts the beginning of the struggle. Or "the end of the beginning", if you like. The people will undoubtedly become aware as they are shown the truth, and the struggle continues and expands. To what extent this will take the edge off any post-revolutionary hardship seems like a really weird quibble to me. quote:All of what you mention is important. However, simply taking things at face value, without considering their context or how they fit in with the larger themes and the film as a whole, is ill-advised. It is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. To do so is not to handwave anything, it's about looking past the surface. Sure we can come up with a reading where Neo is calling Bill Clinton, saying he's going to tell people about the Black Helicopters and the gun-confiscating G-men. It might even be funny. But it doesn't seem very fruitful or insightful, at least not to me. But heck, who am I to judge? I was given the impression earlier in this thread that intent and the like is inadmissible. But never mind that. What I'm saying is basically the opposite of how you present it here. If someone decides to make a film in 2013 where greed and exclusion are central themes, the attributes and terminology of something like OWS is probably going to be involved to some extent. They are probably going to influence the film in a myriad ways, not just through conscious decisions by the creator, as he fleshes out central ideas and fills in the blanks. That said, for all the superficial influences, OWS has almost nothing to do with anything we see in Elysium. It's (superficially) "99 vs. 1 percent, fighting over healthcare", but that's it. Far more important to Elysium are the possibilities that technological advances offer mankind. Not really, we just disagree about their significance and how it should inform our reading. As you say, they were everywhere back then. They are used as the enforcers of a system that strives to hide the truth from its subjects. My objection is that you seem to inject specifically (right-wing) libertarian political baggage based exclusively on their appearance, without any other support in the film. That, to me, does not suggest critical scrutiny so much as jumping to conclusions based on preconceived notions. I hope that doesn't offend you. Also, Smith very obviously comes to represents something that is different and separate from the other agents, and I'm not talking about the sequels. Is this a new reading you're proposing? Because I find it kind of difficult to reconcile with the libertarian version. To be perfectly honest, I can't make much sense of it. To summarize: "Morpheus is mentally ill and delusional. The Matrix depicts 'the real world' (which is not the desert of the real), the virtual world (the Matrix) and Morpheus' nightmare (the desert of the real). Neo has 'demonic power' in the form of immortality. Instead of using this power, he should 'take the Matrix seriously' by giving himself up to it entirely." Is that accurate? Because it sounds kind of out-there to me. While Morpheus might be something of a fanatic, there's little evidence in the film that he's insane. Neo wants to show people the truth and free them from the constraints of the system. He wants to use his power to do good. And if he is immortal, it is only in the Matrix. So immersing himself in it completely seems like it would achieve the opposite of what you're saying. That's where he's "safe", it's his GTA. So what you're suggesting seems more like an escape. To be like Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, wouldn't Neo have to leave the Matrix forever? But again, I feel like most of this is going over my head. I don't know about the squids in the Matrix and things like terminators. I think there's a difference when something has been designed exclusively to hunt and kill people. I agree about District 9's message. My take on it is "Deep down, we're all prawns", but that seems pretty similar to what you're saying. But I think they're supposed to be a metaphor for immigrants, not workers specifically. I'm not so sure about the last part. I guess you could say that they all represent different aspects of similar fears. Sakarja fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 20:56
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's also worth noting that Matrix, Sajarka's example of a correct film, is a classic libertarian film - in which the rebels are trying to, nonspecifically, 'free minds' to the fact that there is a reptilian conspiracy stealing their bodily fluids. There's no reptilian conspiracy to steal bodily fluids in the Matrix.
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Mar 25, 2015 22:41
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Sakarja posted:Is this a new reading you're proposing? Because I find it kind of difficult to reconcile with the libertarian version. To be perfectly honest, I can't make much sense of it. Morpheus isn't insane. He has prevented himself from going insane by becoming a simple David Icke conspiracy theorist.  Conspiracy theory is a form of "cognitive mapping' that allows Morpheus to explain why bad things happen - people die, accidents happen, there's widespread strife, etc. The universe is inconsistent and the big Other is gone. Someone must be to blame. In the 2011 Winnie The Pooh movie, Christopher Robin (the creator/leader of the animals) goes missing, and the animals are left lost and confused. So they go to Owl - who they believe to be the wisest of them - asking what went wrong. Owl, having no idea, invents an evil creature called the Backson: Pooh: But Owl what does the Backson do? All: Yes Owl what does the Backson do? Owl: Hmm, what does the Backson do? I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking and now I will tell you They sneak into your library and scribble in all your books All: The Backson, The Backson! We don't like the Backson! Owl: When decorating your Christmas tree, they tangle up all the hooks! All: The Backson! The Backson! We're afraid of the Backson. Owl: They spoil the milk, they stop all the clocks, they use their horns to put hole in your socks All: The Backson's the one who's been putting holes in our socks! ...and it goes on like that, with the animals getting psyched up to hunt down this new enemy. This 'Backson' is another name for the 'Other of the Other' I have been writing about - the same character that Neo monologues to at the end of the film (by picking up a random telephone and whispering into it like a weirdo). Since God is dead, Owl (the film's Morpheus figure) found it necessary to invent Him. And Owl isn't lying - he is simply struggling to come up with a theory that explains what he sees around him. Like the animals of the Hundred-Acre Woods, Morpheus and Neo cannot cope with the actual reality: that Christopher Robin is just a child, and bad thing happen for no reason. Even if someone does vandalize your books, that person is just another human being like you are. This is the point of 'love thy neighbor'. Confusion over the levels of reality is understandable, because Matrix itself confuses the issue. Here's the proper way to read the film: the matrix is reality, and the blasted apocalypse that Morpheus sees is the same reality, viewed from a different perspective. Put simply, Matrix is not actually a virtual-reality film but a time-travel film no different from Terminator: the same universe, at different points in time. In that sense, Morpheus isn't entirely wrong: we are 'living in the end times', to use the title of Zizek's book. But Morpheus' approach is poor. He believes that he has discovered the truth, when the truth is actually found in the unbridgable gap between the two points of view - "a certain gap that is stricto sensu a fundamental social fact. The 'tickling object' is here the absent Cause, the unfathomable X that undermines every narrative solution." This is the radical social antagonism that is class struggle. In a very basic way, Morpheus displaces class struggle "onto the struggle against the [Reptilians], so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the '[Reptilian] plot.'" The character in the Matrix who actually understands what's going on is, of course, Smith. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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Mar 26, 2015 00:02
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Confusion over the levels of reality is understandable, because Matrix itself confuses the issue. Here's the proper way to read the film: the matrix is reality, and the blasted apocalypse that Morpheus sees is the same reality, viewed from a different perspective. Put simply, Matrix is not actually a virtual-reality film but a time-travel film no different from Terminator: the same universe, at different points in time. It is a virtual-reality movie actually.
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Mar 26, 2015 08:36
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Koos Goop posted:There's no reptilian conspiracy to steal bodily fluids in the Matrix. That's true, on two levels. First: it is, more accurately, a squid conspiracy to siphon our bio-energies. This squid conspiracy is simply directly analogous to David Icke's reptilian conspiracy. Second: this conspiracy doesn't actually exist; it is Morpheus' paranoid fantasy. Koos Goop posted:It is a virtual-reality movie actually. This is innacurate. Matrix is, however unwittingly, a reality of the virtual film. If approached as a film about playing videogames, it is a miserable failure.
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Mar 26, 2015 09:47
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Morpheus isn't insane. He has prevented himself from going insane by becoming a simple David Icke conspiracy theorist. I see very little difference between the two. We're not talking about diagnosis here, Morpheus is insane in the colloquial sense of the word. His pathological obsession with the theory - and his inability to see the world other than through its warped lens - are the clearest expressions of this mental illness, even if the theory is not itself the root cause. Also, it seems misleading to invoke a book written by David Icke after the fact, in what seems like an obvious attempt to cash in on the popularity of The Matrix, as evidence. How could the ramblings of mentally unstable charlatans possibly add to our understanding? quote:Conspiracy theory is a form of "cognitive mapping' that allows Morpheus to explain why bad things happen - people die, accidents happen, there's widespread strife, etc. The universe is inconsistent and the big Other is gone. Someone must be to blame. In the 2011 Winnie The Pooh movie, Christopher Robin (the creator/leader of the animals) goes missing, and the animals are left lost and confused. So they go to Owl - who they believe to be the wisest of them - asking what went wrong. Owl, having no idea, invents an evil creature called the Backson: Morpheus and his crew actually go looking for Neo, not the other way around. So it's not like he's forced to make something up on the spot to bluff his way out of the situation. It follows that Morpheus must be either delusional or deceitful, while Owl is merely trying to save face by hiding his illiteracy. It appears as if Owl is mainly interested in how he's perceived by the animals. The way you describe Morpheus, on the other hand, sounds like he's trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. Either his own faith is strengthened by the act of proselytizing, or his sales pitch to Neo is actually a desperate cry for help. Maybe Morpheus knows that his theory is pure nonsense, that it will only warp his mind and alienate him further. He wants Neo to show him that he is wrong, even if he's only subconsciously aware of this. Another important difference is that both Christopher Robin and the Backson are actually real in Winnie the Pooh. They're just not what the animals believe them to be. There is no obvious counterpart to Christopher Robin in The Matrix, and equating the Backson with the Matrix would lead to the conclusion that the latter is in fact real, but actually benevolent and kind of dumb. Finally, what is the significance of Scripture in a world where God is dead? quote:Confusion over the levels of reality is understandable, because Matrix itself confuses the issue. Here's the proper way to read the film: the matrix is reality, and the blasted apocalypse that Morpheus sees is the same reality, viewed from a different perspective. Put simply, Matrix is not actually a virtual-reality film but a time-travel film no different from Terminator: the same universe, at different points in time. In that sense, Morpheus isn't entirely wrong: we are 'living in the end times', to use the title of Zizek's book. But Morpheus' approach is poor. He believes that he has discovered the truth, when the truth is actually found in the unbridgable gap between the two points of view - "a certain gap that is stricto sensu a fundamental social fact. The 'tickling object' is here the absent Cause, the unfathomable X that undermines every narrative solution." This is the radical social antagonism that is class struggle. In a very basic way, Morpheus displaces class struggle "onto the struggle against the [Reptilians], so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the '[Reptilian] plot.'" That's actually more confusing than any previous version. I think you're making this more difficult than it needs to be, it's actually quite simple. The apocalyptic hellscape is real and so is the Matrix, in that the system exists and humans take part in it. Neo's story is basically the standard "Stupid boy meets wizard. Wizard trains boy, tells boy to fight evil dark lord. Also, wizard might turn out to be sort of flawed and weaker than boy initially believed." The similarities to the Terminator franchise are obvious. But without the possibility of time travel, fighting robots in the apocalyptic plague pit is the only option. And Smith is a total moron who doesn't understand anything.
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Mar 26, 2015 17:24
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Icke went with Matrix imagery for a reason. You will not see a sequel book like "Children of Elysium, by David Icke" because District 9, Chappie, and Elysium are not conducive to being read as conspiracy theory narratives. Even though there is an actual conspiracy in the plot of District 9 - the CEO wiretaps Wikus' phone, uses a tracking programs on him, manipulates the media, etc. - this villain is presented as just a simple human, directly equated to the crippled gangster/scammer character Obesandjo. The common joke, summed up in Enemy of The State, is that "it's not paranoia if they're really after you". But that's not really accurate. It can be paranoia EVEN IF they are really after you, because (paraphrasing Lacan) "when a husband is pathologically jealous, obsessed by the idea that his wife sleeps with other men, his obsession remains a pathological feature even if it is proven that he is right and that his wife effectively sleeps with other men." In other words: Morpheus might actually be tracked by government agents (he is, after all, a terrorist cult leader), but he is nonetheless paranoid in a pathological way. District 9 shows the opposite case: Wikus actually has a big conspiracy against him, but he's not paranoid at all. Neo is selected by Morpheus because he is already, at the beginning of the film, a hacker searching for 'answers'. That hacker software engineers tend to be most hardcore libertarians is so well-known that there's actually a specific term for it. Cyberlibertarianism: "a form of libertarianism that views the Internet or cyberspace as a means of attaining individual existence without central governments." This is exactly what Neo describes at the end of the film. This is why Chappie is best read as a satire of Matrix. Contrast the presentation of Matrix's Tom Anderson with the presentation of fuckin Deon. Pretty much all the main characters correspond in a straightforward way: Deon ---> Tom Anderson Ninja ---> Morpheus Yo-landi ---> Trinity Vincent ---> Smith Chappie ---> Neo Michelle Bradley ---> the mysterious squid-God that Neo addresses at the end of the film. That's not to say that the characters are directly the same, because the joke is in the nuance. For example, Blomkamp depicts his 'Tom Anderson' and 'Neo' as fully distinct characters. His 'Smith' is a doofus, and there is no 'Lizard King'. Michelle Bradley is simply a human person, with no grand design. This leads to the overall point that Chappie, unlike Neo, has no illusions that his techno-immortality will actually solve anything. He doesn't call up Michelle Bradley on the phone to issue vague threats. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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Mar 26, 2015 19:01
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is innacurate. Matrix is, however unwittingly, a reality of the virtual film. If approached as a film about playing videogames, it is a miserable failure. Actually, the Matrix is a cyberpunk-influenced film about virtual reality, which it uses as a loose metaphor for the American dream.
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Mar 26, 2015 20:18
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The common joke, summed up in Enemy of The State, is that "it's not paranoia if they're really after you". But that's not really accurate. It can be paranoia EVEN IF they are really after you, because (paraphrasing Lacan) "when a husband is pathologically jealous, obsessed by the idea that his wife sleeps with other men, his obsession remains a pathological feature even if it is proven that he is right and that his wife effectively sleeps with other men." In other words: Morpheus might actually be tracked by government agents (he is, after all, a terrorist cult leader), but he is nonetheless paranoid in a pathological way. District 9 shows the opposite case: Wikus actually has a big conspiracy against him, but he's not paranoid at all. Actually, paranoia is by definition unjustified.
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Mar 26, 2015 20:21
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Icke went with Matrix imagery for a reason. Ehhh. (How) should James Holmes' Advanced Cosplay inform our reading of The Dark Knight and the Joker's message? The best version of that joke is probably "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you", which seems to be your take on Morpheus. But comparing Wikus to Morpheus doesn't really work. Wikus, like Max, is just a "gritty" slapstick character who does a bunch of body horror pratfalls. Their stories are basically a series of mishaps, as they try not to become a prawn/die of radiation poisoning. Neither of them really has the time to think very much about the bigger picture. A superficial reading of Elysium certainly seems to suggest something like the NWO. More importantly, the central conspiracy in Elysium involves collusion between Big Government and Big Business in an effort to subvert the Free Market. Cyberlibertarianism doesn't seem like a good fit (for The Matrix) since they apparently believe that "computers will set us free" or "computers will solve all our problems". In The Matrix, the computers are the problem. In Elysium, all of mankind's troubles are solved by a hard-charging entrepreneur with the help of a computer. quote:This is why Chappie is best read as a satire of Matrix. Contrast the presentation of Matrix's Tom Anderson with the presentation of fuckin Deon. Pretty much all the main characters correspond in a straightforward way: I don't know about that. Deon and Chappie are separate individuals, while Neo and Tom Anderson share the same mind. Smith was always a doofus. And I'm not sure if the Matrix has any grand design beyond "keep on truckin'".
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Mar 26, 2015 20:58
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Koos Goop posted:Paranoia is by definition unjustified. Correct. A person can react in a way that is 'unjustified' even if they actually are in a bad situation. Koos Goop posted:The Matrix is a cyberpunk-influenced film about virtual reality, which it uses as a loose metaphor for the American dream. Again, you are correct. The film uses literal VR as a plot device to represent the actual topic, which is just everyday reality in America.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:09
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Correct. A person can react in a way that is 'unjustified' even if they actually are in a bad situation. Paranoia means the thing they're afraid of isn't real or dangerous.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:23
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Yeah if it's real or dangerous it's just called, y'know, "fear"
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Mar 26, 2015 21:26
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