Dear friends,
I’ve been wishing people “happy new year!” both verbally and in emails since January 1, but it rings hollow. The word “happy” is part of it, but that’s for another newsletter. The marker of the new year, artificially helpful as it might be to help us mark time and and our selves in relation to such an abstraction, seems largely pointless in a world where January 1, 2022 held all the same injustices as December 31, 2021.
Recently, and not so recently (so, really, for many years now), I’ve been wondering whether I have any new ideas. I wonder, even, what it means to have new ideas. Certainly, they’re new to me when I stumble across them. I want that to mean something. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it shouldn’t.
I’m used to newness of the intellectual variety being useful, in some way. Not useful in the utilitarian sense; I can’t light a room with idea lightbulbs. Useful, rather, to my standing within particular systems and spaces. When I learn something new in school, I get to talk about it in class, write a paper, take an exam and I’m rewarded by colleagues, teachers, numbers or letters that I’ve learned to equate with success. When I learn something new about teaching, I can try it out in the classroom, and am potentially rewarded (or devastated) by my students’ responses. When I review a book, I’m paid to write my newish ideas down and share them with an editor who shares them with the publication’s audience. But none of these rewards say anything about an idea’s originality.
Maybe there are no new ideas. Maybe there are only reconfigurations and reorientations, the particles of one idea becoming the building blocks of another. Maybe that is beautiful enough. Profound enough.
Anyway.
Originally, I was supposed to spend New Year’s Eve drinking and playing board games with some dear friends who are visiting California. But my partner and I had only just returned from Connecticut, where we had been with his family for Christmas, and we’d been in New York City before that, which is still showing record number of Omicron cases, and then on multiple planes and in various airports. It felt unwise to meet before we could all get PCR tests, and since we weren’t able to get our results in time… well.
Instead, my partner and I marked the new year by watching the second and third Matrix movies, after watching the original the week before. They’re fine! I’m not sure why people have been hating on them for so many years.
I remember loving Matrix: Reloaded because the cliffhanger left me and my friend Orin drooling (I have a fond memory of us walking tremendously fast, propelled by adrenaline, from the Azrieli Center Mall back to Givatayim at about 10pm, both of us 13 and reveling in the terrifying notion that none of this is real while also salivating over Keanu Reeves—and, probably, Carrie-Anne Moss, although neither of us were quite ready to say so yet). When Matrix: Revolutions came out, I remember thinking it was sort of silly (I cannot understand why those big fighting machines people sit in don’t have protective cockpits).
That’s still largely how I feel. But in the years since, The Matrix has achieved permanent cultural notoriety for its aesthetics (which harken back to cyberpunk like Neuromancer by William Gibson and the 1982 Blade Runner as well as to martial arts movies), for the cooption of the movie’s concept of the red pill by the alt-right; and for being a pretty clear metaphor for the trans experience. Since the second and third films cavort in the world that had blown our minds in the original, and since there’s little to no further character development, yeah, I can see how over time people came to see the sequels as lesser.
But having watched them all close together, what I think I, at least, have been missing is the element of camp, which is definitely more pronounced in the sequels. The movies aren’t trying to be anything other than what they are, though, and I think that’s where we (by which I mean mostly millennials, who were at various impressionable ages when we first saw these movies, and whose lives have been defined by the rapid rise of technological advances) ran into trouble when talking about The Matrix sequels. We wanted them to be what we thought The Matrix was when we first saw it: philosophical, introducing a new and mind-bending way of thinking about the world, original. Instead, they’re mostly just…fun. Fun with some big ideas thrown around, loosey-goosey. Fun with some horrifying moments. Fun because the humans win, kind of.
But original? I don’t know. The premise of The Matrix isn’t something the Wachowski sisters invented. The Wikipedia entry for The Matrix franchise has a whole long section titled Influences and Interpretations which begins:
The Matrix films make numerous references to films and literature, and to historical myths and philosophy, including Buddhism, Vedanta, Advaita Hinduism, Christianity, Messianism, Judaism, Gnosticism, existentialism, obscurantism, and nihilism. The films' premise resembles Plato's Allegory of the cave, René Descartes's evil demon, Kant's reflections on the Phenomenon versus the Ding an sich, Zhuangzi's "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly", Marxist social theory and the brain in a vat thought experiment. Many references to Jean Baudrillard's 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation appear in the first film. Baudrillard himself considered this a misrepresentation, although Lana Wachowski claims the point the reference was making was misunderstood. There are similarities to cyberpunk works such as the 1984 book Neuromancer by William Gibson, who has described The Matrix as "arguably the ultimate 'cyberpunk' artifact".
Japanese director Mamoru Oshii's 1995 film Ghost in the Shell was a strong influence.
What made us hold onto The Matrix wasn’t so much any actual, whole-cloth originality. It was how it took familiar, existential ideas that people have been thinking and talking and writing about for millennia, and reconfigured them, alongside cyberpunk/goth/anime aesthetics and a dope soundtrack, into something that felt new. Maybe that’s the real magic of newness—not that it is new, but that it feels new.
All of which is to say that I’m very much looking forward to watching the new film which, I understand, does a lot of expectation shifting, and also, apparently, having turned in my comps portfolios hasn’t slowed down my obsessive analytical brain’s desire to unpack and unpick and comment upon most any media that I consume or enjoy. Is anything I’ve said above new? Probably not. That’s okay.
I hope this new year feels new to you, even if nothing has really changed since December 31.
I am going to be trying to write more frequently now that I’ve turned in my comps portfolios. I’m making lists of things to write about, including books that I’ve been reading and haven’t been able to write about elsewhere.
Thank you for being here. I appreciate you.
Yours, etc.,
Ilana
Some recent reviews I wrote: