“The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes.”

Like a few million other citizens, I’m slowly rising to a fever-pitch of excitement over the upcoming “Matrix” sequel. The first movie had everything you could want - Hong Kong-style action, a unique look, immaculate sound, ground-breaking special effects, a satisfying and surprising story, and philosophical connotations that were thrilling and fascinating to evangelists, nihilists, and existentialists alike. And, of course, it’s just plain cool.

But I find myself remembering that the popularity of “The Matrix,” and even my own deep and possibly unhealthy devotion to it, wasn’t instantaneous. Its box office numbers were great, but not enormous - it ranks only 76th on the all-time box office list, not quite as much of a blockbuster as “Liar Liar” or “Crocodile Dundee.” And yet it has become the best-selling DVD of all time.

Why is that?

One of the standard interpretations is that the film’s technical merits, the special effects and sound, made it a perfect showpiece for the rapidly-growing number of households with DVD players. In essence, it was a matter of timing.

I don’t buy that. That is, I think it is a matter of timing, but timing of a different sort.

The central revelation in “The Matrix,” in case you haven’t seen it (sorry for spoiling it, folks, but you had your chance) is that we humans are living in a computer-generated dreamworld while our bodies, unknowing, are lying in goo-filled pods, their electrical and thermal energy being harvested by the sentient machines that created and control the fabricated late 20th-century world we believe to be real. It’s a technologized version of the ol’ Cartesian brain-in-a-vat, with the machines as our shared demon, creating and controlling our simulated world around us. Anyone who’s spent any time in Disneyworld can relate to this dark vision.

Back in 2000, back when the newly-pressed DVDs of “The Matrix” had only just begun to fly off the shelves, we lived in a fundamentally different world. Then the election happened.

Bear with me. Whether or not you believe that the end results of the Presidential Election were fair, what is undeniable is that it was ugly. Both sides maneuvered and scrambled, largely behind closed doors, and any correlation between what eventually happened and actual democracy was coincidental. When it was over, our newly-crowned President and his agents declared a period of “healing,” and then proceeded to never, ever mention it again. This crash program of repression and denial is not a method of “healing” that you’re likely to find in any self-help book. The message was clear: “Your world has been remade. Accept it and move on.”

What followed didn’t help. The Enron revelations showed that much of our prosperity had been illusory, and 9/11 shattered of our simulacrum of security.

You see where I’m going with this…

The War on Terror has only made this alienation worse. It proved that no amount of yelling, protesting, and reasoning from inside or outside the U.S. can alter the course that the Bush machine - powered by its citizens - has fixed itself upon. The laws that determine what we can do, and what rights our citizens have and what recourse our prisoners possess, all these have been shifted around us, provoking a vague and unsettling sense of deja vu and forcing us to move on as if in a dream, under new rules that we can only uneasily pretend to understand. The Matrix has us.


[Ralph Nader in his office, flanked by aides
and supporters, plans the ‘04 campaign.]

On my tougher days, I suspect that our love of “The Matrix” has as much to do with this as it does with the techno, spiraling cameras and cool black leather-and-vinyl outfits. And what’s disturbing about this is the realization that the movie is, ultimately, a tale of messianic deliverance. What we’re longing for, maybe, is someone to come and release us from this simulated world of terror and unheeding governance. We’re hoping for release, liberation, even revolution. And that’s a terrible thing for an American to have to wish for, even as an idle fantasy.