The Performance of Male Subjectivity in The Matrix Trilogy
1 When The Matrix[1]The Matrix. Dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski. Warner Brother, 1999. by the brothers Wachowski was released in 1999 the film was celebrated frenetically as a masterpiece worldwide. Even the academic world chimed in with the praises of the extent of self-reflection to which contemporary mainstream cinema was able nowadays. By means of an enormous amount of psychophysical-technical simulation[2]That is, a simulation generated by directly bombarding the optical nerves with electro-technical stimuli in an interrelated series. the film raised the topic of alienated human existence to the latest level of the post-modern condition. Critics declared that its powerful imagery constituted a seductive vortex which amounted to an elaborate critique of the mass media.[3]By now the Wachowski brothers have created a complex, commercialized The Matrix-universe, including online computer games and a computer animated compilation of short films, The Animatrix (2003). This rouses the suspicion that the success story of the Matrix films is indeed a stroke of genius planned from first to last by Hollywood mega-capitalism and that the films might in fact be mere add-ons of the computer games. Since then two sequels have been produced: The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions.[4]The sequels were released world-wide in 2003 with only a couple of months separating them. Because of its narrative density and the ironic finesse with which it treats the highly topical virtualization of the world as well as of the self, The Matrix was appraised as matchless and unique. In spite of the serial character established by its sequels, it was retroactively allocated the status of a closed entity. Accordingly, the academic verdict on The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions could only be scathing. Regarded as mere continuations of something unique, the sequels were belittled as purely commercial action-movies and mass-produced articles. And yet it is this recalcitrant reception, I would argue, which paradoxically attests to the basic principle of the films, a principle they expose and at the same time work with: the principle of consistency as regards content and narration, which is intimately connected with that of production and therefore always accompanied by a potential surplus that precludes closure as such.[5]For this reason, the commercial exploitation of the Matrix-hype by the Hollywood industry becomes visible as a clever reaction rather than a fully intended instrumentalization of this phenomenon. Thus, the three films do in fact form a unit, but one which is potentially infinite and open, since they point out that stability can always only be achieved through recursion, that something appears as consistent only if something else is retroactively posited as foreclosed. This, of course, is precisely what the concept of performativity maintains in regard to the production of subjectivity, as Slavoj Žižek and, in regard to gender identity, Judith Butler have pointed out.[6]Especially Butler's concept foregrounds the compulsive nature of this process, which is brought about by social interpellation. Gender identity exists only in the permanent (re)production of the normative contents of this interpellation. Film as a mass media genre can be said to function analogously in that gender is not simply a natural given but necessarily conceptualized as something constituted and negotiated in this medium.
2 My thesis therefore is that the trilogy essentially speaks of, indeed demands, the constitution, development and stabilization of a male subject. Reviewers have commented extensively on the figure of the Chosen One, the eschatological willingness to sacrifice oneself, and the almost epic-scale heroism around which the films revolve. Each of these paradigms can be folded back onto that of the development of (modern) subjectivity. I would like to argue that in the figure of Neo as the Chosen One the trilogy permanently reproduces a consistent concept of active masculinity by means of the formal principle of recursive (presup)position (Žižek, Die Nacht der Welt 154). Subjectivity, especially when it takes the form of male heroism, is an ongoing process and therefore a performance; this is one of the trilogy's most essential, constitutive messages, which the films never acknowledge openly but keep producing on a formal level. Neither a pre-existing entity nor located in the natural biological body, masculinity is always contingent and relational. Inserted into the context of an undiminishedly powerful heteronormativity, it is at the same time conceivable and above all representable only in relation to femininity as its delimiting difference. At first glance, the films thus seem to represent a rather conservative, stabilizing trend of the Hollywood cinema dispositif. At the same time, however, the trilogy is perilously situated on the brink of an abyss when the production process of this masculinity exposes its own constitutive dependence on a femininity whose visible and representative manifestation could hardly be more energetic, nimble and clever. Moreover, the object's circulation in the symbolic circuit, which here takes the form of the search for a riddle's solution, lays bare the constitutive flip-side of active subjectivity as such, that is, its fantasmatic supports. Its final solution, though, which identifies the hero himself as this very object around which the whole story has revolved all along, can neither be interpreted as an act of self-recognition by the Cartesian cogito, nor as a system-constitutive error. Thus, The Matrix trilogy figures as the prototype of contemporary manifestations of a dispositif that seeks to (re)consolidate the severely shaken status of male heroism by employing strategically its whole array of technological possibilities. The time of an essential, unchallenged masculinity figuring as emblem of universal humanity is definitely over; and yet its status is reclaimed again and again with the help of the latest in film production technology. In this essay, then, I would like to explore the two (retroactively posited!) preconditions which formally constitute the indispensable functional supports of male subjectivity; and I will further explain their effects in the course of the whole trilogy. But first we should recall what the matrix itself might stand for.
3 From the narrative universe of The Matrix, broadly speaking, there emerge the features of a messianic hero who is to liberate humanity from the ubiquitous yoke of the machines. This process is embedded in the thematic context of individual human freedom and collective fate, that is to say, of contingency and determination. As Elisabeth Bronfen in "Erlöserfiguren ungewöhnlicher Art. GATTACA und Matrix im Vergleich" has made clear in her analysis of The Matrix, the films offer no reliable statements about their eschatological content or the utopian dimension of the notion of salvation. Very perceptively, she also remarks that the hero is interpellated by a performative gesture and by this means summoned to the status of savior in the first place. This "production process" of the One can be characterized, Bronfen claims, as a digital series of 0 and 1, in which Neo becomes the One because all the differences previously raised in the film dissolve in his person. At the very moment when Neo emerges as an essentially immanent unpredictability of a technical system, he is uniquely enabled to change it as a whole. With his insider's knowledge of the code he can change the rules in his (own) favor as he goes along, as well as bring it to the attention of others. I want to argue, however, that any narrative fixation of this status is already superseded by the production process itself. The Matrix produces a surplus which cannot be contained in one narrative only and thus demands a radically different theoretical perspective.
4 In the second part of The Matrix, the architect enlightens us concerning Neo's relation to the system: he is indeed the One, not, however, because he can change the system, but because he figures as that deviation which the system needs to establish itself in the first place. To paraphrase Žižek, an ideological system exists only as the effect of a collective fantasmatic presupposition on part of its subjects (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 118).[7]The thesis of a manipulating mastermind behind the matrix must already be seen as a phantasm of this film. The idea of a controlling power constitutes a scenario in which the subject is never able to attain some kind of unity. The film allocates this constellation of fundamental lack, collectively externalized as alienation, a perfectly fitting image: the matrix. This is how Žižek describes it:
What, then, is The Matrix? Simply the Lacanian "big Other", the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimension of the "big Other" is that of the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings, the subject doesn't speak, he "is spoken" by the symbolic structure (Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 216).[8]The virtual reality represented by the matrix differs from the symbolic order only in its status as a secondary induction. Phenomenologically, it is defined through images. However, it too needs to adhere to the structural laws of the symbolic order insofar as activity is still only enacted through an other who represents the subject. The subject therefore can never be completely in control of its own agency. See Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies 127-167.
Thus, the Matrix provides the meaningful hold onto reality without which subjects cannot exist at all. Its simulations do not obfuscate the "real" reality (be it material or ideal), but they obfuscate that there is nothing whatsoever "out there" which the subjects could symbolize (the Real, whatever its contents might be). The oppressive ideological system, which has to be changed (if only from the inside), has this single function: to draw attention away from the fact that a non-alienated existence is unattainable per se. There is no way, however, that a systemic change could be induced by any act of agency on the side of the subject, since active subjectivity is nothing but an imaginary, fantasmatically supported concept itself. Only the act of assuming responsibility for one's own status as a passive object, which corresponds with the notion of a manipulating, invisible mastermind as the second "real" support of human existence, could induce any kind of "systemic change." According to Žižek, the second scenario of unattainability is represented in that sequence which shows the human beings, attached to tubes, lying in tubs.[9]According to Žižek, this sequence offers a rather naive scenario. For it is this content of the Real alone - i.e., the phantasma of passivity - which constitutes the condition humaine as such. Žižek has elucidated this conception, especially in regard to the domination of the visual in cyberspace, by applying the model of interpassivity; his specific example is the Tamagotchi-phenomenon. See Žižek, Liebe Deinen Nächsten? 201-226. For him the matrix is a thematically consistent image for the symbolic order and as such represents the sine qua non of human existence. His readings seek to discover the fantasmatic supports necessary for the production of subjectivity in the whole symbolic realm of the films. Following Žižek and, indeed, going beyond his analysis, the whole The Matrix trilogy can thus be interpreted as an apparatus which is able to produce successfully a consistent concept of the male hero only by (re)producing its two necessary, preceding supports. The imaginary, closed concept of masculinity entails above all Neo's acceptance of his symbolic mandate as savior. The acceptance of his "destiny", however, renders such issues as free will, extent and quality of impersonation and the question of how a mask can create authentic subjectivity problematic. That his status as the Chosen One rests on the witness of a community of simple-minded believers such as the group around Morpheus, is an important factor here. Žižek's interpretations of the notion of destiny and especially of symbolic impersonation highlight the formal nature of this issue. The figure of the savior is not defined by his inherent qualities but rather by his function which is strictly bound up with a position in the intersubjective network the three films spread out. The shifting meanings of his task only serve to underline this kind of determination. It is therefore Neo's (self)sacrifice which finally makes him the savior in the eyes of those who already believe him to be the savior. Yet the content of the two supports, I would argue, is not identical with that claimed, because desired, by Žižek.[10]At the same time this figure is revealed on the formal level of production as an empty signifier the competing forces equally can refer to, so that the operations of both, the résistance as well as the machines, follow the same logic. The savior is therefore not an iconoclastic figure, as the films seem to claim at first, but basically consolidates the symbolic universe as a whole. The only serious threat to the films' veritable flood of images is posed by Agent Smith, who is himself contaminated with the essentially human stain of desire and longs for a material based reality beyond images and technologies of representation. In what follows, I will demonstrate and explain this other content.
5 In the first frame of the second sequence of The Matrix we see a monitor in close-up, on which a newspaper article, uploaded from the internet, is displayed. The article features a bold looking, colored man; its headlines declare him to be the worldwide most dangerous terrorist. This is one of the central characters of the film, the leader of the résistance, Morpheus. A male figure has fallen asleep in front of the monitor, his head resting on the desk. In a slow tracking shot, the camera moves toward this figure from behind. At this moment we do not know yet that it shows us the protagonist of the film, Thomas A. Anderson alias Neo. The camera cuts to Morpheus' face in half-profile on the monitor. Then, in a reverse-shot, it moves closer to and beyond the head of the dozing figure, who is wearing headphones. It is suggested that the muffled music we hear in the voice-over issues from those headphones. In this way, the camera creates an increasingly intimate connection between the two figures even while neither of them is able to perceive the other consciously. Even before the protagonist wakes up and starts to act, the film establishes a special relation between him and Morpheus. In the guise of a digital or virtual self, Neo's future mentor is already watching over the pupil he has elected and will train to be the "Chosen One." The mode of representation already suggests that what we see is located completely in the symbolic. This suspicion hardens during the next frames. After a series of cuts has established the room the dozing male figure is situated in, the camera returns to a close-up shot of the back of his head, then re-focuses on the monitor in reverse-shot. The newspaper articles disappear, the screen turns black, and a bright green cursor starts to gleam and writes the following line: "Wake up, Neo!" All this time we still hear electronic dance music in the voice-over. The camera cuts back to the figure who raises his head, squints into the camera and asks in surprise: "What?" Then, irritated about this unwanted intrusion into his digital privacy, Neo tries to interrupt it by pressing the EXIT-button. To no avail, the interface persistently keeps transmitting two messages: "The Matrix has you" and "Follow the white rabbit" - two baits which will initiate his quest. Apart from the fact that the sender of this message remains anonymous, one might well wonder how the figure could have reacted to these messages at all. How is it possible that he is woken from his sleep without any audible stimulation? This is indeed a remarkable scene, since the film suggests that we witness a moment of semiotic identification with the name on the screen while this is utterly impossible according to the "hard," physical facts. Even if the computer were able to generate a human voice, Neo would de facto not be able to hear anything but music since he is wearing headphones. Yet he opens his eyes and, almost at the same time, utters in response: "What?" Again, he has in fact not been able to see the line on the monitor. That the protagonist is at first in a state of narcissistic, pre-symbolic self-sufficiency from which he awakes in order to enter the process of becoming a subject, falls short as an adequate interpretation. On the contrary, the film offers several clues that the very conditions necessary for the constitution of subjectivity are already completely established in the form of the symbolic network.
