THE MATRIX FILM

The Matrix Film

The Matrix Film

Introduction

In his Postmodernism for Beginners, Richard Appignanesi suggests that postmodernism is something unavoidable, stating that “modern is always historically at war with what comes immediately before it” (1995: 19) and, therefore, “is always post-something” (1995: 19). Consequentially, postmodernism is modernism that was taken to its extremes and became its own contradiction. This necessity of modernism to become its own negation in order to be reborn in a new form derives from the fact that any kind of art “can only progress towards its own self-annihilation” (Appignanesi, 1995: 45). As it is a constant tendency of the mankind to always progress toward modernity, it must have become an unceasing tendency as well to annihilate the modern and shaping the postmodern of what was left, the cultural remains.

The concepts of postmodernism: “Hyper reality and cyberspace”. In the Movie “Matrix”

No wonder that postmodernism, which probably has its roots in architecture, had made literature its home and soon started invading different genres and sub-genres, as well as “infecting” other arts and, finally, became so widespread that it is almost ubiquitous.

A sub-genre of science-fiction, cyberpunk is an exceptional example of postmodern literature, as it was, though perhaps unintentionally, postmodern from its very beginning. Film art, on the other hand, though far from being postmodern in its origins, easily adopted postmodernity, as the make-believe nature of film art allows blending conventions and playing with images to present to spectators pictures of credibility unknown to readers of postmodern literature. A fusion of cyberpunk and film seems to be unavoidable. Yet, only few cyberpunk films have been made so far. Among them, the most famous and spectacular - perhaps the only cyberpunk film known outside the science fiction ghetto - and yet the most postmodern is the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix.

This is exactly the message of The Matrix. The whole idea of the film is an assault not only on spectators' senses, but on their common sense as well. Leaving the cinema, one may think about being so fortunate and living in the reality of the 1990s, and not in the monstrous future depicted on the big screen. Yet, after a moment, one realizes that the characters in the film also think that they live in the relatively peaceful 1990s. In the film itself this reality is nothing more than Jean Baudrillard's postmodern simulacrum: an image that originated ...