What Was the Matrix?

The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski), 1999

The Matrix was the third in a cycle of movies to arrive in the late nineties with a strikingly similar theme. Like its predecessors from the previous year, Dark City and The Truman Show, it tells the story of a seemingly ordinary man who suddenly finds that his whole life is faked: he is trapped in an artificially created environment designed to keep him in submission. Like the heroes of those earlier movies, Keanu Reeves’ Neo starts to realise that he is somehow special, and tries to escape the confines of his prison. Yet while I liked both Dark City and The Truman Show (particularly the latter), I think The Matrix found the most perfect framework in which to play out such a story. The artificial city of Dark City was essentially a fantasy construct, kept running by creatures with mysterious magical powers; while The Truman Show was a more reality-based media satire that showed its fake world constructed painstakingly out of bricks and mortar. The inspiration of The Matrix is to graft this plot into a cyberpunk premise in which the world is a computer simulation, created to keep humans enslaved so that machines can live off the energy produced by their bodies.

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Two Murders in Dallas: Documentary, Reality, and Dubious Truths

“It’s plausibility, its authority, is the special quality of the documentary – its attraction to those who use it, regardless of motive – the source of its power to enlighten or deceive.” – Eric Barnouw1

The distinction between fictional and non-fictional filmmaking is seldom neat. While the terms invite the suggestion that fiction and non-fiction can be readily separated (“fiction” is that which is invented, and “non-fiction” is everything else), most writing on documentary cinema recognises that the waters are muddier than the terms imply. The link to “truth” or “reality” that might seem documentary’s defining feature is often a tenuous one, since every stage of the production of a film apparently distorts the subject. This includes not only the artistic devices imposed upon a film to give it some sense of structure or coherency (editing, framing, narration etc), but also the choices of subject and the mere act of filming. These elements of construction separate the documentary text from the original referent, and are for the most part shared with fiction films. Since both fiction and non-fiction films often employ these techniques to similar ends (to create narratives, for example) this has led to suggestions that documentaries must themselves be considered fictional constructions. Even if the two forms aren’t merged in such a fashion, certainly such an approach to documentaries casts deep doubt over any claim a documentary might express towards stating a truth. This is particularly true where the statement of fact being expressed is itself a controversial or strongly contested one. But is it perverse to argue that claims to truth or reality in documentary are illusory if these are the essence of the form? In this essay I look at two films, Erroll Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), and Oliver Stone’s JFK (1990), against the context of this debate. Both these texts are hybrids of fictional and non-fictional techniques, although most would agree that Morris’ film is ultimately a documentary while Stone’s film is a fiction. They each take real events as their subject, and make a claim to revealing a truth about an event. In each case, that statement of truth contests an official, government endorsed verdict. Since the quest for the true story is a central motivating concern of each film, they make ideal case studies when examining the idea that documentaries must be considered a form of fictional filmmaking. This essay will explore the differences and similarities between the two films (and the two forms), the ways in which fictional and non-fictional traits cross from one form to another, and the implications this has for the representation of real events by the cinema.

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Repuzzled

The Matrix Reloaded (Lana and Lilly Wachowski), 2003

The Matrix Reloaded labours under mighty expectations. It isn’t that this is the most expensive and hyped movie of the mid-year round of blockbusters: we don’t have high expectations of heavily hyped movies any more. It’s that its predecessor, 1999’s The Matrix, is so well regarded. With that film, Larry and Andy Wachowski blended elements such as cyberpunk, comic books, Jet Li-style kung fu, and John Woo-style gunplay into a satisfying and exciting narrative. The elements that were mixed weren’t unfamiliar: indeed, many were already well on the way to hackneyed. But the film fused its checklist of geek favourites into such perfect harmony that it was a deserved critical and financial hit. Only four years later it has already staked a convincing claim as a modern sci-fi classic.

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The Enigma of Rosebud

This is a recycled undergraduate essay, originally written in October 2002; I’ve left it on the page as I think it holds up relatively well as a survey of some of the main writing on Citizen Kane, and it used to get a lot of hits when it was posted on my old page.

Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) is probably the most celebrated film that has ever been made: it is unnecessary to recite the list of top tens that it has dominated to make this point. It is a cliché that Citizen Kane is “the greatest movie that ever has been or will be made.”(1) In this role it acts in the kind of calibrating role that Shakespeare’s plays do in literature: when arguments about canon formation threaten to descend into squabbles about the subjectivity of greatness, Citizen Kane serves a useful function as a marker of almost universally accepted merit. A cursory glance at the literature on the film highlights the fact that it has attracted the attention of many of the most prominent writers on film, across the spectrum from both popular critics to academics. The list includes Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, David Thomson, Peter Bogdanovich, Andre Bazin, Andrew Sarris, David Bordwell, Noel Carroll, Laura Mulvey, and many others.(2) This veritable rogue’s gallery of big names attests to the insatiable urge amongst critics and theorists across the cultural spectrum to add their own take on Kane. Given that most of these writers ascribe to the essential view of Kane is a masterpiece, they add an impressive strength to its cultural status. Yet upon closer examination the inevitable diversity of opinions amongst these writers makes it harder to describe the “Kane as masterpiece” positioon as unified. The writing on Citizen Kane starts to resemble the film’s eyewitness descriptions of Kane himself: the more contradictory explanations of the movie are offered, the harder it is to reconcile a clear view of what the film’s virtues really are. Often, a particular account of the film is also accompanied by an implicit (or even explicit) assertion that it is the writer’s own view that really describes the film’s central great qualities. Such an invocation of a critical “Rosebud” – the observation or critical approach that really serves to throw the jumbled mass of Citizen Kane into focus – is to be expected. One such critical “Rosebud” is Noel Carroll’s essay on the film, which speaks of two contradictory meanings in the film and suggests a way of reconciling them. In this essay, I will use Carroll’s article as a starting point for a survey of popular writers on Kane (Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and David Thomson) and more academic approaches (Carroll, David Bordwell, and Laura Mulvey), noting in particular their divergent approaches to the key question: what is Citizen Kane really saying?

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Lordy

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003)

Peter Jackson brings his epic Tolkien adaptation to a triumphant close with Return of the King. It doesn’t quite pick up directly where The Two Towers left off, instead starting with a brief but effective prologue showing the fateful moment in which the ring first fell into the hands of Smeagol / Gollum. Structurally, this prologue is all wrong (it was apparently intended for The Two Towers, and that is where it would have sat more logically), but it’s an added treat: it feels like you’ve received a bonus before the movie itself has truly started. Then we’re back into the action where The Two Towers left off, once again cutting between two main threads to the story. Frodo and Sam are still trying to reach Mordor to destroy the ring, while Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pippin play various roles in the defence of Gondor from Sauron’s armies.

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Send in the Clones

Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002)

Part I: All Things Star Wars (The Story So Far)

I’m an unabashed fan of Star Wars… but lately when I say that, it always sounds defensive. I grew up with the original trilogy: while I was too young to enjoy the first two films’ release, they were a video fixture throughout my youth and I remember the excitement of seeing Return of the Jedi in cinemas in 1983. When Lucas re-released the trilogy in hacked-about versions in 1997, my disturbance at his poor creative decisions could not entirely stifle my excitement. As an adult cinema buff, this was my chance to experience the thrill of enjoying Star Wars properly, as a cinema experience. I knew the new trilogy was coming, and that every few years until 2005 I would get a new chance to relive the magic. In 1999, however, The Phantom Menace let me know I was in for a bumpy ride. A film so wretched in so many areas it almost defies any attempt to catalogue its faults (click here for my own attempt written at the time), it was particularly had to take because of the way it seemed to undermine the foundations of the earlier films. Entering the cinema hoping to be reunited with familiar characters, instead I had C-3PO with his skin ripped off. Wanting more quasi-mystical dialogue about Jedi knights sensing the “Force,” I instead was shown Obi-Wan Kenobi doing blood tests for “midi-chlorians” like an intern at the pathology lab.

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Shot by Shot

Psycho (Gus van Sant), 1998

The chief question running through reviews of Gus van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho has been a simple one: Why? The suggested answer has often been a cynical one: the film was financed as an easy way to cash in on the continuing popularity of horror movies and utilise the Psycho trademark now that the sequels have run their course. The response from most critics ranged from bewilderment to contempt.

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It Made Me Want to Sleep in Mummy’s Bed

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock), 1960

I’m told that a small boy who stayed up to be scared by this masterpiece said afterwards “I liked it, but it made me want to sleep in Mummy’s bed.” – Kenneth Tynan(1)

If you were to pick the most famous single scene from movie history, you’d probably have to choose the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Film buffs might shout “Odessa Steps” at you, but while Eisenstein’s bravura sequence is more important (if only for being earlier, and arguably a model for Hitchcock), I doubt any other moment in 100 years of cinema has been the subject of as many imitations, homages, and parodies. The whole film, in fact, has been so endlessly reworked, remade, and revisited, that today’s viewers will usually come to Psycho with much of the film already in their head.

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Star Trek: Imbroglio

Star Trek: Insurrection

The title’s the first big warning sign. Star Trek: Insurrection? Oh yeah. What’s next? Star Trek: Fracas? Star Trek: Imbroglio? Star Trek: Brouhaha?

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Hell’s Bells

Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino), 1980

This wasn’t “an unqualified disaster” or “a phenomenon.” This was just – a flop. – Steven Bach

Possibly the finest book written about the making of a film is Steven Bach’s Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, which chronicles the disastrous production of Michael Cimino’s epic western. It’s written from a rarely revealed insider perspective (Bach was a key executive at United Artist’s during the film’s preparation), but that isn’t its only appeal. It captures an important moment in film history: the last semblance of old-style moguls had been swept away (Arthur Krim departed UA in 1978 after 27 years) and the era of decentralised corporate ownership had begun.

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