i am zombie
by jebni on May 17, 2003
Saw The Matrix Reloaded on opening night. Not great, but not a disaster either. I guess it was always going to be an uphill battle — I never wanted to see Zion, which I always knew would be tacky and embarrassing, and the stupid hippie-doof/rave scene confirmed this in spades. The thing we all knew about The Matrix was that the, uh, Matrix (i.e. our everyday life, gradually uncovered as a malignant construct, and subverted by the insertion of people in cool clothes with cooler moves) was what we really liked, rather than the flaccid sf blockbuster tropes that Reloaded simply couldn’t avoid enacting. Bombastic speeches are great when “reality” is under assault and drenched in conspiracy, but they’re utterly crap in the comfort of your own underground rebel city. They really should have found a way to short circuit this tendency. In many ways The Animatrix was better.
Funny things: Cornel West — Cornel Fucking West! — as a Councillor of Zion, and Hades rewritten as a Merovingian monarch (thus deepening the whole gnostic/Cathar/grail-quest hermeticism — the medieval French Merovingians claimed to be descended from Judaic kings, and figure greatly in conspiracy lore as being keepers of the Grail, and actually being the literal descendents of Christ). Slightly disappointing: yet more physical objects in the Matrix, especially human bodies, revealed as 3D assemblages of green phosphor code. I was willing to see this as heightened metaphor at the climax of The Matrix, but the abundance of this in Reloaded made it feel like a bad, Lawnmower Man-style B-movie.
I got to meet my invisible friend Cori, too, of which I was very glad. Her hair is much greener than I had previously thought.
9 comments
hey, i really liked the doof scene! although i thought it could have been done a bit better a la the film clip to one of the chemical brothers’ songs (hey boy, hey girl). it could also have done without the tacquoi sex scene intercut into it. it also needed a better soundtrack.
why is zion called zion? it makes me squirm. could they not have come up with a more secular name for the rebel city.
by claire on 18 May 2003 at 2:21 am. #
Yeah, the soundtrack was often shite. While the original Matrix soundtrack (like a lot of other things about it) was a tad obvious, and occupied a similar sonic territory to this one (trip-hoppy gothy metallic atmospherics), the first soundtrack was far, far more iconic. In fact, that’s how I’d compare the two movies in general.
I had a conversation about the naming of Zion on the train tonight. Some people have been calling the Matrix movies “pure Zionist propaganda”, and while there’s probably a connection to dodgy Zionist politics somewhere along the line, to write it off as pure propaganda is too crude a reading. People don’t write off Bob Marley and Rastafarian mythology as “pure Zionist propaganda”, simply because in that context, “Zion” can’t be reduced to the ideology of Israeli colonial statehood.
Yes, the Matrix movies partake of a strong Judeo-Christian line of mythology, and the naming of Zion is a consequence of this. But it’s mashed in with so much other stuff, and in such loopy ways, that it’s impossible to render it as a parable with absolutely concrete correspondences. I don’t think the movie is particularly “progressive” in its “ideological content”, but that’s not what’s interesting about it. And yes, I expect that many people who had a stake in the movie are probably Zionist, like a lot of movies made in Hollywood. So while I concur that use of the name “Zion” in a Hollywood movie does press my buttons, I don’t think the process of interpretation should end there.
by jebni on 18 May 2003 at 4:41 am. #
…and you would like the doof scene. Yeeeech. Reading your Pattern Recognition. Nice.
by jebni on 18 May 2003 at 3:06 pm. #
i choose to take your last comment as a compliment — as i did when my boss once said to me “you look very ecclectic today”. i really like what you said about the soundtrack/s and the movie/s being iconic or lack thereof. it does sum up how i feel about Reloaded but i’ve just been saying the second is not as good. i know you hate lord of the rings but i honestly think the two instalments stand up better than the matrix ones. there’s something about writing sagas that has been long lost in hollywood i do feel — originally peter jackson was supposed to stuff all three parts of lord of the rings into one. how criminal would have that been? not quite sure what my point is now so i’ll move on.
the comment about zion was kind of throwaway — just something that i needed to express. i wasn’t under the impression that the matrix was propaganda for zionism but then again there’s a lot of very strange interpretations of the movie out there. i was told by a fundamentalist christian that it was all about finding jesus and then of course there’s the interpretation about it being anti-capitalist. so in some ways i think it’s quite a clever movie in that respect. anyway i raised it to scratch an itch and to see what others thought about the whole thing — what did the person on the train say?
by claire on 21 May 2003 at 1:48 am. #
ps Pattern Recognition is THE best book i have read in sooo long — my favourite of his. i can actually understand everything that happens in this one i think. usually the technological side loses me. also the characters — way cool. who wouldn’t want to be cayce pollard and have CPUs. have you looked at ebhind the dust cover of oryx and crake yet?
by claire on 21 May 2003 at 1:58 am. #
I don’t hate Lord of the Rings. I just don’t think there’s anything that interesting about Jackson’s films, and that regardless of this, there are endless things to marvel about them, mainly on the level of “wow, how crazy was this to make??”, and on that level I am an obsessed fan (I braved the crowds on the day The Two Towers opened, own the limited edition DVD of the first movie, etc.). But only really on that geeky level. Which counts for a lot.
Sorry, I took your feelings about “Zion”, which I share, as an opportunity to crap on about other views, which I didn’t think for a second you totally shared, or anything. The person on the train hadn’t seen the movie, which was why they’d raised the topic — they were curious about whether it was crazy Zionist rubbish. The crazy interpretive stuff on the web is dumfounding. These days it’s perverse Zionists making pre-emptively parodic and mock-defensive interpretations. “Neo = neocon”, etc.
My only real quibble with Pattern Recognition is that Gibson doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about sometimes, and that this sticks out more obviously when he’s writing a novel of the present. Still, given that he’s the master of deep meditation about surfaces, I suppose this doesn’t really matter much. One thing I don’t have a problem with is that “convenient” plot logic. That’s something I really enjoyed.
Saw the frightening bunnies.
by jebni on 21 May 2003 at 8:10 am. #
ok so maybe it was someone else who has an abiding hatred of lord of the rings. i agree that at some level they’re not that interesting — they could be seen as just amazingly good examples of a certain genre. however i find there’s something in the movies that really grips me in a way that Reloaded just didn’t. i know that they are two totally different movies but there is something to be said for movies that just grab you and transport you. the first matrix did that and i felt it was missing from the second.
anyway, you don’t need to apologise for taking up what i said about zion. in the same way as the person on the train i was asking for some feedback and i found yours interesting. i don’t know anything about the politics of the film makers or about the concept of zion outside of the obvious. what i was looking for was whether you or anybody else did.
i guessed i missed the bits in pattern recognition where gibson didn’t know what he was talking about — maybe cause i know enough to follow the story but not enough to be able to pick holes in the tech side. except than to know that there is no way a hotmail email address would be regarded as secure by anyone with half a clue. there were so many aspects of it that i enjoyed — the allergic reaction to branding, especially michelin man, was so cool. i also found it spoke to a deep longing inside of me to have one of those cool capitalist jobs where you get paid heaps and live this really cushy lifestyle with little gadgets for really doing nothing more than critiquing the revolting excesses of capitalist marketing. how do you get a job like that?
glad you saw the scary bunnies. everyone should.
by claire on 22 May 2003 at 1:10 am. #
// spoilers coming //
Saw The Matrix again and thought i might mention that when Neo’s in the mainframe, footage of Sharon is put in the same shot as Hitler.
And whose Colonel West?
by hon on 29 May 2003 at 11:01 pm. #
Really? Interesting! Apparently George W. Bush is in there as well, but I must have vagued out. Cornel West is a popular African American progressive academic with an interest in both religion and Marxism, and is the author of books like Race Matters. Lately he’s come under accusations of being a “left Zionist” because of his association with progressive Jewish intellectual Michael Lerner, who prefers to think about the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of equal claims for “security”. I think there’s a big difference between saying that Jewish civilians, like any others, have every right to a just life, and the idea of “security for Israel”, which inevitably means another thing entirely. Anyway, I still think that while they’re very liberal, West and Lerner have some interesting things to say.
by jebni on 30 May 2003 at 8:11 am. #