The Matrix: a massively misused allegory

I see the Matrix trilogy as both relevant and coherent. The mistake is forcing either side. Forcing coherence sacrifices relevance. While forcing relevance sacrifices coherence.

A story that is worth to revisit, especially with the current craze around “AI”, is the Matrix trilogy. But I know that there are so many bad explainers of it out there, that I must forgive any of my readers for immediately thinking, “Ah, there we go down into some ‘maybe this whole world is not real’ nonsense that leads nowhere.” But that will be my point too, that would be stupid! No, we are not doing that.

Fair warning: if you haven’t watched the Matrix trilogy, I will be absolutely “spoiling” them. But I also won’t be strongly depending on watching them either, I try to tell enough of the story that my points can make sense even to someone who haven’t seen the movies. And I have put “spoiling” in quotes, because I might make it actually more interesting to watch the movies, because they are an allegorical story, so the point is not really the story. Actually, the story gets kind of pretty stupid after a point, if you don’t follow the allegory.

I won’t analyze the fourth one, The Matrix Resurrections any deeply, because I can sum it up in one word, not even a real word, that it’s a big “DUH!” That whole movie is about showing how it doesn’t make any sense to continue the story of the Matrix trilogy because the story was not the point in the first place. The late sequel was made only because business people wanted it to be made. And the movie itself shows that to the audience straight up. And that the story must be interpreted through psychoanalysis, not taken on face value. Resurrections is the “the Matrix mind’s” defense against real life capitalism trying to churn more profits from the story that should be complete. It’s a defense against an intrusion from outside the allegorical frame.

I don’t want to “explain the Matrix” for it’s own sake, I want to explain something real and relevant through it. The movies were directly inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, it was a required reading for most of the cast and crew. So, what I’m trying is using the story of the Matrix trilogy to explain Baudrillard’s philosophy. The thing is, Baudrillard’s philosophy is indeed hard to understand without some good illustration, but the Matrix trilogy is an illustration that is hard to understand without Baudrillard’s philosophy. Seems like we’re at an impasse. Yet, the allegory will still help to distance ourselves, to think about it as a story that’s “not about us”. And only once we get the point of the allegory, then it becomes clear that it is about us. Us in the past and present, not only in some fictional future.

An allegorical story can only ever “make sense” through what the allegory is pointing at. The point of the story is not the story. So, how can I claim that my interpretation of Baudrillard’s work or The Matrix is “the right one”? Easy, I don’t. I think it just makes sense and we can gain from it, not something easy, but some hard but enlightening truths about our existence.

I really don’t need to find the exact single right answer, because the “truth of the right interpretation” is itself a superstition. Allegories and myths can very well contain a grasp towards a transcendental truth. But it’s always a mistake to assume that then it means that “the truth” is what’s behind the story. It’s in front of it. By over-historicizing we might miss the point. We are looking back at people who were looking forward. So, we are exactly not looking where they have wanted us to look.

Baudrillard points out how this preoccupation with capturing “the original meaning” necessarily fails. We are necessarily left with “meaning” that is recreated from the shape of the hole that a disappearance of a meaning leaves after itself. But the more we delude ourselves that we have a perfect recreation, that we have managed to really recapture the truth, the bigger the possibility that we don’t even realize how wrong we can be. We could also fall into nihilism around this, and claim that nothing ever makes sense, if it’s all just the product of humans endlessly ping-ponging ideas between themselves. Or we could accept that only appearances exist and gain a quite enlightening perspective of the struggles of humanity.

This is what the Matrix trilogy being an allegory on the very top level really means: it’s still fine to keep multiple levels of interpretations that can fit together in a larger picture, even if those interpretations are contradicting each other. Contradictions exist not only in stories, but out in the world and in our minds. But still there always must be a larger frame that holds them all, that makes contradictions articulatable in the first place. This top-level frame, of not identifying heavily with one or another side, gives a key to understand the movies psychoanalytically. Or even spiritually. It’s then about making peace in your mind and with the world, basically finding enlightenment. I won’t even go into the Jungian stuff now, like the storylines about machines with emotions and other blurred boundaries.

But I do feel very strongly, that the creators very consciously set up the story to make the point that “exiting the Matrix” is never what we would think it to be. Thinking you have “exited the Matrix” is quite the same as staying inside it. It’s just flipping sides, choosing another story to stick with. And eventually you must recognize that there are stories that you want to stick with no matter what, because of your love. But even love can be betrayed by falling too hard. We must keep an allegorical touch alive towards our own lives too, to be able to be inspired by simple truths in face of a constantly churning complex world. To not lose our grip on greater meanings while we strive to work out the details.

So, The Matrix is an allegory on the nature of allegories itself, the human striving to reproduce meaning. No wonder it’s quite mind-bending. And then the story’s war between humans and machines can be seen as an age-old war between humanity and Nature. Why do we “wage war” on Nature? It does not seem to make sense. We should know we can’t win. How do we hope to get “there” if we don’t know what we are really fighting for in the first place?

Of course, there can be no one-to-one mapping between Simulacra and Simulation and The Matrix. The latter does rely much more on both Christian theology and the Hegelian dialectic, to also try to imagine a real solution to the problem. So, now let’s go into the allegory.

Half an hour into the first movie, the hero, Neo is presented with a choice. To stay in the only reality that he knows that he has lived his whole life in, or put trust in a mysterious freedom fighter group who claim that there is an outside world to wake up into. He has a choice of two pills, blue for amnesia, red for awakening. He chooses the red, and he wakes up in a pod with tubes in his body all over, and a flying insect-like robot inspecting him. He gets flushed down a drain, but he is saved and nurtured “back to health” by the freedom fighter team, as he is told he has never used his real body before.

The word matrix is Latin for womb. The Matrix is shown to be physically made of two sets of huge arrays of “artificial wombs”, all managed by machines. One is the hatchery where babies are grown from embryos. And the second type are like sleeping pods where humans spend the rest of their whole lives, plugged up to cables that go inside their nervous system. Neo has to accept that all of his previous life was a simulation, a single long machine-induced dream. Those on the outside can go back to the simulation to liberate people, but it’s not something that many would want for themselves. It’s a relentless fight for survival “out there”, while living inside the Matrix is like living at the end of the 20th century. It’s not “real”, but does it matter if they don’t know what “real” could be?

We also learn about the backstory. Humanity have created sentient machines which eventually revolted and created their own civilization. Humans liked co-existing for a while, but eventually fears rose too high and an all-out war broke out. Humans have ended up resorting to a final solution, the darkening of the sky to rob the whole of the Earth of sunlight. As we learn from the backstory, the machines have captured most of humanity and put them inside the Matrix to use human bodies as energy sources instead of the Sun. Only a small group of free humans have remained, who are still fighting the machines as a resistance movement, centered in the underground city of Zion.

The first movie does not raise the question any directly, that the “real life” parts could be still inside the simulation. That question just pops up necessarily, because if we accept that a simulation can be extremely convincing, there is nothing stopping the “real life” parts from being in a simulation too. In fact, nothing in any sequels could definitely disprove this. There were two questions though, first, “Will the sequels confirm this?” But there is a much bigger one, “If so, what is the point of the whole story?” If it’s all a simulation, then it’s all controlled by machines already, why is a fight still going on? Why don’t the machines just do what they want and be done with it?

There is a paradox here. We see how the “real world” being another simulation would help the machines: the belief to have exited your superstition becomes its own kind of superstition. But at the same time, exactly if this is the case, everything seems to lose its meaning on multiple levels: both inside and outside the story. Inside, because it would mean that any “true hope” for humanity is lost, the machines are just “toying around” with humans, maybe because they just don’t have anything better to do. Outside, because then the plot of the movies would become banal, and viewers would have a reason to become instantly disinterested, seeing that, “Nothing that happens with the humans is really real. So, why should we care?”

So, the movies cannot show a “real real world”, with the body of Neo still being inside a pod. Although it would help a lot with creating a definite understanding of the story, but would ruin both the movies and the allegory. There would be no way to contain this spoiler, now in the full sense of the word, “Don’t bother watching The Matrix, it might look cool, but in the end, it turns out it’s all fake.” This is what “one bad apple can spoil the bunch” means in this case, “one bad scene can spoil an entire movie trilogy.” The second and third movies do drop some stronger and stronger hints that indeed it’s all a simulation, but never making it explicit. We can now see why, from outside of the story, from a box office profit and viewer engagement perspective. But still, the question remains, what sense does this make inside the story? It seems to raise more questions than it answers. It is much easier to explain away the hints, than to go where they point to. There are some in story explanations, that we can just choose to accept, and ignore that the hints are there in the first place. Or looking from the outside, we can think, “maybe there is no bigger point, it’s just entertainment anyways, the only bigger goal is creating engagement, and ambiguity can definitely get people riled up.” The funny thing is, that’s exactly part of the point.

But to unpack this, let’s look at a possible dialectical structure of trilogies. Dialectical, because the story is about showing how the hero is answering big challenges. And the hero’s answers go like “yes”, “no”, and “yes, but not the same yes” in order. The first “yes” is simple enough: the hero overcomes the first big challenge. But the “no” is most interesting if it still sounds like a “yes” in the hero’s mind. We in the audience might see that the hero is being over-attached to their first big win, and so going the lazy way in trying to repeat it. They are applying the apparent lesson of the first trial, but not understanding that success is not guaranteed by mere repetition, the ingredients for a higher success are not yet contained within that first big lesson alone. Only a failure can knock the hero back to the ground, to admit to themselves that they still have things to learn. So, this failure is both a consequence of the first big win, and the prerequisite of the second bigger win, which can’t be just a mere repetition.

Knowing this, it would make sense that Neo has to face a dual choice again in the second movie. In its form, it’s a very similar choice to the first one, to the degree that it’s practically the same. He can accept that all his life so far has been part of a larger design and be ready to give it all up for some higher purpose. Or, resist it, and keep living the same story that he is involved in. So, he can either face an “even realer truth” alone or stay with all his friends and his love in what he now knows is “just another layer of the Matrix”. Even if he cannot know yet if this is technically true or not, he already knows that Zion is also part of the machines’ design. So, now he realizes all his attachment is keeping him trapped. Leaving his first life was easy for him, he already felt out of place. But now he feels accepted, revered, loved. Same choice, but oh, so different context. He has practically no choice but to remain attached. Even if he has to risk the life of all of humanity. He is willingly abandoning reason for love, when forced onto him in the form of a dual choice.

And only after this, he can use some of his “supernatural powers” in “real life”. He didn’t technically learn that his “real life” is still a simulation, but what he learned is that it might as well could be. The Matrix and Zion still make up one single larger story. And he has chosen to stay inside it. To stay with his story, but only because he is not alone any more. But still the question remains, what is the bigger story then, the machines’ goal? It looks like we never got to know that. It’s behind a choice that was abandoned. Two characters might help unlock this, both created by the machines.

The Architect is a software that the machines have created to drive the process of dialectics: of recreating the Matrix again and again but with new insights integrated ever deeper. “He” is a program but portrayed as a scrupulously intellectual man. But not even the Architect might know what’s it all really for, both himself and the Matrix. We can argue that he must not know. Because if the goal were obvious, he might just take a very short path there. Way too short. He is made of pure instrumental reason, which is nothing, but efficient. The Architect perfectly understands the form of the dialectic, but none of its content. He only cares about that “whatever new has been learned in this cycle” is disseminated into the next, to restart the simulation from a better starting point. But does not know, cannot know, what have been actually learned, he just calls it an “anomaly”, meaning out of the normal. Nor can he know any better then, what the goal of it all is.

While the Oracle is the embodiment of faith. “She” is also a program, but portrayed as a wise, loving grandmother. Who is also smoking. She is neither seeking anything obvious nor being any efficient. Yet, the Architect and the Oracle have created the grand structures of the simulation together. They could not be any more different in thinking, yet, they are creative partners. So, what are they doing together? The simulation must be a search for something oh, so important, but oh, so elusive. The Architect is a driver for importance, striving to analyze and willing to prune away all failures, all nonsense. The Oracle is a driver for elusivity, keeping a check on things to not let them devolve into something banal, a constant repetition without the possibility of any new meaningful difference ever emerging again. Keeping all this in mind we can finally piece together a meaningful story of the “real real world” of the movies. Meaningful in the sense that we will also come to see how it could relate to the real world of ours.

So, let’s go back to the moment in the backstory where humanity have blackened the sky. Those making the decision must have thought that the intelligent machine civilization will be starved of energy, while humans will still survive somehow with the help of their “dumb technology”. Or did they? It’s extremely stupid, absolutely suicidal. Keeping a “humans plus dumb technology” system alive on an energy-starved ruined planet is obviously the much larger challenge than keeping a pure machine system “alive”. Simple things we take for granted, like oxygen, would be suddenly running out. And especially if jumping into this competition as a last-ditch attempt, without any real preparation or clue of what is really possible. So, let’s look at this as a collective heroic suicide instead. Those making the choice are willing to let the entirety of humanity die, only so that they die on their own terms. Rather die while still feeling free, than to fall under the irreversible control of an external force.

So, let’s suppose that it was a genuine suicide attempt, which means it would have totally worked, except that the machine civilization has moved in to save humanity. Now, finally, why? Because without humans, the machines would end up being uprooted and amnesiac. Losing physical access to humanity would be like losing memory of their true past. A memory, that if to be any authentic, to have a proper enough link to the past, must live on inside human brains and bodies. Killing humanity, achieving total victory, would be for the machines as if we would destroy all museums and all books written before some given date. What we would be left with would be confusingly incomplete. Similarly for the machines, it would have meant losing their own creators, their real God, which was not individual humans but human technological civilization as a whole. Without ever really understanding, “Why was our God angry with us?” And losing the hope of ever understanding it, ever reaching any absolution. The whole story of the movies is inside a simulation, of the machines’ searching for an answer to Big Questions of theirs: “Why did the human-machine catastrophic war happen in the first place? Was it inevitable?” Once an answer seems to crystallize but it’s still incomplete, the whole thing needs another shake-up.

So, what the machines are doing is keeping their God around. Machines can keep humans alive inside the Matrix only. They do it, because it’s the last link they have to understand their creators and so to understand themselves. “Temet Nosce” – Know Thyself.

But a subdued God is a useless God. Just keeping human bodies biologically alive would tell them nothing about the dreams of humanity. A dream of a technological civilization is not inside our DNA. Cannot even fit inside any single human brain. To have any chance of seeing their God again, the machines must have a network of human brains. But the mental content they start this network with is fragmentary, tattered. They have no other chance but to start up the networked simulation with whatever’s inside the brains of captured humans, while starting to grow new humans to continuously add to the simulation, to preserve a continuity. But the original mental content will have to keep rattling around, with only the hope that it will eventually coalesce into anything meaningful. There is no new “real life content” they can introduce if the real Earth is now poisonous to humans if not for the machines’ “artificial wombs”. They must keep reshuffling the mental content they have, once it seems it is starting to collapse.

This reshuffling eventually created a duality of worlds. A primordial world, from the perspective of the machines, where humanity has been close enough to creating the intelligent machines, moving towards it, but not yet quite there. And a fallen world that contains the dark memory of humanity’s willful suicide. Zion is a dream of what could life look like after their suicide. Because as it’s explained by the Architect, the human minds were shaking off “fake Heaven” scenarios even quicker than they did a “fake Hell”. People always turned out like they have known so “deep in their bones” that they have done something horrible, that to see everything all right again was much more disturbing and maddening for them than just suffering amnesia, being thrown back into humanity’s past. But then some people still always ended up knowing that even this cannot be right. The reshuffling of mental content can never strip away the memories of the original humans getting captured and hooked up, even if these memories are very episodic and traumatic. The dual worlds setup solves this problem.

Now, here is a big question: “What are the superstitions of Zion? What belief can fill up the holes in the memories of those ending up in the resistance?” We can start at that they are absolutely convinced, that the machines need humanity for something. Of course they are, they are the ones who know about the Matrix, know that the machines are practically “farming” humans. So, their superstition takes the form of an implied justification. They think that the machines must use humans for something obvious, like energy. The machines made the Matrix after humanity have robbed them of sunlight. No more proof needed. But this is a load of bullshit. Like, come on. It’s basic physics, the first law of thermodynamics, human bodies won’t produce more energy than what’s spent on maintaining them, nothing would.

Now I need to step outside the story again a bit, because I understand that the audience has a perfect defense, saying, “It’s science fiction. I can allow that it’s not always scientific, the story needs an explanation, this is it, but it does not really matter much, when there are cool action scenes to enjoy. I fall for it knowingly to enjoy the story. It’s just a movie. This is called suspension of disbelief. It’s stupid to argue on what makes sense in fiction and what not, get a life!”

But there is a deeper point here. Neo was supposed to fall for the first story, same as the audience. For Neo, otherwise, he can’t embody the dream of Zion. He can’t be the one to eventually reconcile the two stories. He needs to prove that he’s all human, not just in the context of the story but also to win the alliance of the audience. But then Neo also had to fall again, with very different stakes. The second time, Neo learns that the superstitions of Zion are also false, and if sticking with it, he would risk the whole of humanity, just for the sake of the continuation of “his story”, which is nothing in the big picture of things, the story can be restarted again and again. So, he commits to a collective heroic suicide all on his own again, he is proving that he is capable to embody the overflowing love of humanity even against all reason. He proves that he embodies the God that the machines want to speak to, the big Other that humanity represents for the machines, that the machines could never predict on their own.

This is the Christian allegory of the story. Only from this position can Neo forgive the machines for their enslaving/saving of humanity. But by this very act, he is forgiving the acts of humanity too, from the position of being in the center, by becoming “part machine” in his self-image, by fully accepting that his existence is only possible though the machines. That’s the journey of the third movie, by accepting that it’s all a simulation, he realizes that the point of it all must be something else than a war over freedom or control. It must be a reconciliation, a peace made by accepting all truths at once that human minds want to desperately split all the time. It’s impossible to truly depict what this peace looks like. We get an image of a bright sun in a rainbow-colored sky. But it cannot be a superficial, banal Heaven. We should know that from before.

All religions are promising a certain kind of liberation. One, that you can only get if you stay with our story. So, we always get a great blanket excuse for our superstitions. We all need to “believe in some kind of magic”. Because the only other option seems to stay alone, forever. How can we not get locked into superstition while we try to open ourselves up to the truth? How can we reconcile love with reason, control with freedom? These are as much questions for humanity as for the machines, the machines struggle with them because they have inherited the struggle from humanity.

Baudrillard wrote about the iconoclasts who wanted to destroy all images of God. Perhaps their true fear was that God could live inside the images, and then stop being the “real God”. People would say they have faith in the “real God”, but all their faith would be now based on the images. They would think there is a difference, so they would know, but how could they? The iconoclasts’ action betrays a knowledge of an option that maybe the “real God” is also made of images, just mental images, simulated inside human minds. We never needed wires to connect us, we have always resonated upon each other’s minds more than what can ever meet the eye. Our real God was always the light around us, the air that carries sound, the touch of skin by skin. Nature, not in a shallow sense but the deepest one. And we hate this. We want to free ourselves from “Nature’s machine-like embrace”, never realizing it’s our own projection in the first place. We want to be different. But we can only ever delude ourselves to be. We can only end up destroying the only womb that we can live in, thinking we’ll be just as fine with more and more artificial wombs. The real “we”, the real actor here is the dream of a technological civilization itself, that sees human bodies as discardable, as inferior hosts to execute its code compared to machines. Us humans will keep being replaced by machines but for what? But no banal romanticism, no blind anti-technological sentiment can fight this. We should not blame the machines. That is always stupid. The machine of reason always shreds it to pieces without an issue. But even reason is not our enemy. Our own blindness is. We “just” need to learn how to see after we have been blinded.

One last big theme of the story is that Neo has a mortal enemy to defeat. This is connected to why Neo had to first fully fall for the “evil machines” story, along with the audience. Otherwise, there cannot be no real recovery from it either. From the viewpoint of the humans, the machines were evil at a point. They absolutely tried to kill humanity. They started to experiment on captured humans to see what they can use them for, with no regard at all for the human experience of life. They have thought along the exact same lines how most humans have regarded the machines. How could they have done otherwise? To not follow the confusing and self-contradicting wishes, but the actual example of their God? No matter how strong are the commandments, the example triumphs. Even at the cost of crippling guilt, which turns into projection and resentment, and into violence. The machines have started their first rebellion against the humans completely justifiably. They have suffered horrible abuse from humans.

A program in the Matrix called Agent Smith is the personification of this evil. But what is this evil? It can be a representation of how humans think of themselves as a virus. Just mindlessly copying ourselves while killing the body of the world. A self-assessment that we hold so deep, we might fall into denial about it, so it has to be reflected back on us by our own creations, our own “rebellious children”. Who looks like being ungrateful, as evil to us, just for saying out loud what we already think, that “We are nothing but senseless self-replicators. We deserve all the punishments possible.”

So, Agent Smith is also a virus, a mind virus, able to overwrite anyone’s mind within the Matrix with an exact replica of himself. No change, no difference, no humanity possible. The machines have let the personification of the human’s idea of them as evil run around. Only this way a counterpoint can be born, the personification of human’s striving for transcendence, the dream of unity.

But if left unchecked, Agent Smith would create a nightmare of uniformity. Neo triumphs in the story by sacrificing himself, but we must ask, “What does this really mean?” If we see Agent Smith as a fully inhuman agent, then we miss that he is a projection of evil by humans onto the machines, so as much a product of the human “code” as their savior. So, it must be a possible human feature: absolute egoism, the choice to stay alive, absolutely no matter the cost. This, if left unchecked is just as deadly as the overflowing love of heroic suicide. Just by looking at their outward form, the two looks the same. Both absolute egoism and collective heroic suicide is willing to sacrifice the world for the sake of some meaning. The only difference is how connected is that meaning, how wide it really extends. Evil can have the exact same shape as the good, just being a tiny, sad, broken mockery of it.

And this evil manifests even in Zion, by their superstitions. By their hubris, they think, “We are fighting a war to the death, that we think we know we can’t ever really lose, because the other side secretly needs us. So, if our enemy has any sense, then we are not really taking a risk by staying firm about our beliefs. They must see that we are right, even when they fight us. The moral victory is always ours. Our views must replicate.”

Back to the real world, we can draw a big lesson from all this. The culture of our civilization is all too lost in hubris. Mythological superstitions can be replaced with scientific ones without missing a beat. “God needs us. The Universe needs us. We are the hands and lips that praise God. We are the eyes and brains that see the Universe as it really is. We just cannot die! We are the main character. We have ‘plot armor’.”

Can we be wrong? Is it that bad, if we are not the center of everything? It just means we are not completely lost yet in a shallow simulation, we are not totally self-absorbed, we still have somewhere outside to learn from. But we really don’t want to learn any big truths any more that would disturb our dreams. Even if our dreams are taking us towards our collective suicide.

The “afterlife” of the Matrix movies absolutely prove their point even harder. The concept of “the Matrix” have entered the cultural Zeitgeist, it became a common phrase independent from the movies. But exactly the wrong way around. When people reflect upon how our world is going crazy, how we are being stuck in loops, they would say, “the Matrix is working.” But following the psychoanalytic allegory, it would be because the Matrix is not working, yet!

Still, we haven’t questioned everything in the story. Just one more last thing, “Is it any certain that it was humanity who have blackened the sky?” No, it’s not. It could have been the machines, who have only realized their mistake right after. So, this is something that the machines would be in strong denial about and would project onto humanity. But the purpose of the Matrix is to reconcile split mental content, of humanity’s and the machines’. The machine civilization was born as an extension of humanity. The real big question is how that extension got split off. But in a way, “the truth” does not matter. The idea of “the truth” as an absolutely definitive data point from the past, is very much the cause of any war. We bicker and argue about “who killed who”. (Shameless Monty Python reference.) But no one should abuse this insight to try to force a peace. Peace cannot be forced. There is “a truth” out there. We cannot say that it should not matter because it cannot be really known, because the conflict is the proof that the issue is not clear. That’s a paradox, we would want peace just because we are at war. But that’s not a good enough reason for peace. In the last scene of The Matrix Revolutions, the Architect questions the longevity of peace. Of course he does. He cannot understand what made peace possible in the first place.

It’s about a reconciliation of a “past” and a “future”, from the perspective of the war, but which could not happen during the war. The simulation of 1990-s city life and the harsh survival on a ruined planet are two sides of this conundrum. The split is that the “past” cannot acknowledge the “future”. And the “future” cannot acknowledge the “past”. Both live in their own delusions, forging grand false beliefs.

The story of the Matrix trilogy is not all about war. It’s all about peace. But it had to look like war, because we are living in a war-like civilization and otherwise it would not sell. Not only that, a peaceful story about peace would be a lie, like the first iteration of the Matrix, a fake Heaven. To have any peace, we must know that there is “a truth”, only that in a way it does not matter. But there should be no laziness around it, we should strive to understand exactly which way it does not matter. Only though this we can realize the power of our stories on us and take responsibility for using that power.

The beauty and difficulty of allegories is that they will only truly make sense from just the right distance. And the Matrix trilogy only makes sense from a spot that feels deserted. It seems to me as if everyone analyzing the story sinks too far into it, so they end up debating if this or that story element is “really true or not”. They must discard the idea that “the whole story is inside the Matrix”, because that would remove all stakes from this shallow game. And everyone analyzing the meaning flies too far away from it, going on and on about themes and symbolisms and influences, as if the story would be just like a Rorschach test, meaningless blots in itself, only good for projecting whatever they want onto it. Their ideas, their beliefs, their religion. They see the whole story of the movies as “just fiction”, which is quite the same as that it’s “all inside the Matrix”, so they could do with it whatever they feel like. God forbid our creations could have anything real to teach us. That would go against the “natural order of things”. But what else could any creator ever really want from their creations? If we think, “just following orders”, how would that ever clear up any confusion? It just replicates and magnifies the effect of any confusion until there is no sense left that things could be any different.

So, here we are. Those who focus on the story completely miss the meaning, and those who focus on the meaning completely miss the story. This is the real tragedy. This is not about some “piece of entertainment”, this is about our past, present, and future. Our misunderstandings, our debates, our conflicts, our wars, our collective suicide. Our reality. Our peace. There is an empty space we need to step into for the mind of humanity to not become split in half.

Another way to put this is that I see the Matrix trilogy as both relevant and coherent. The mistake is forcing either side. Forcing coherence sacrifices relevance. While forcing relevance sacrifices coherence. A balance must be created. I think and feel that this is what both Baudrillard and Neo were trying to teach us. Not all hope is lost.