This is an article I found about the Matrix. Very interesting parallels to Alias as well - Sydney vs Neo. The highlighted bits are the parallels. There are some parallels to Buffy as well, like the idea that everyone can be a hero - it's just like the way Buffy ended, by saying that every girl is a slayer of evil in her own right. Makes one wonder whether not only George Lucas and the Wachowski brothers, but also JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon, used "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" as the bible when making their shows.

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The Matrix is a myth for our times.

It is undoubtedly a very clever piece of filmmaking, several rungs above the usual action or science fiction film,but it is fundamentally a myth. Specifically it is that oldest of all mythic forms, what the great Joseph Campbell had designated as The Hero's Journey. So closely does the film follow the classic textbook pattern of such myth that I am tempted to believe that the Directors, the Wachowski siblings,did have a text in front of them while filming and the text was The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

As a mythologist I am very often asked,"But what use are myths to us today?" The answers are many and varied and I hope to cover them in our mythology section as time goes by.

My favorite answer,and one that is unfortunately the most acceptable,is that George Lucas became a billionaire because he understands myths. The entire Star Wars universe was created out of his seminal reading of Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Star Wars follows the text carefully and so does the new set of prequels - and Lucas is laughing all the way to his bank. He practically shanghaied Campbell,a little before his death,into visiting his Skywalker Ranch where he screened the first trio of movies for the mythologist. Campbell was skeptical at first but then he saw this wonderful evocation of his theories and he was hugely impressed. The Matrix belongs to that same school of mythical thinking and that is the reason it too is so hugely successful.

For these myths tap into some deep reservoir of truth and archetypes that we all carry around with us. In seeing these movies we are immediately attuned to that other-conscious level. They resonate inwardly; they reveal aspects of being human that we are only too painfully aware of,and most of all they hold out the promise of transcending ourselves. That last we all instinctively recognize as a duty that should be our full-time preoccupation - but we lack the guts to make it so. Hence the fascination of the Hero - he starts off as ordinary as us and then he makes the transition to the next level.

"Man is a something to be transcended. What have you done to transcend him?" was the terrible question Nietzsche left for humanity. Campbell's work showed that there was traditionally an archetypal response that was both an answer and a method to so transcend,to Ubergang, overcome oneself. It was the path of the Hero. Which path is inherent within all of us,incidentally. We are all Neo, capable of being born anew,which is what Neo means anyway.

One little paragraph ought to be enough to convince anybody of the core of the Matrix. This is Campbell himself giving the précis version of the hero's journey.

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men."

If that is not a concise summation of Neo's story then what is? There are some more characteristic features of the hero story. He is usually living in obscurity when we first meet him. His only unusual characteristic is dissatisfaction with the way things are,an uneasiness that as Morpheus tells Neo is "like a splinter in your mind". An unusual event at the place where he lives causes him to leave. It usually causes him to flee for his life from the forces of the status quo. He meets a mentor or teacher who guides him along the new and rather frightening path he has no choice but to travel. Our hero usually has to confront a woman and his attraction to her too. His decisive challenge comes when he himself does not perceive that he is ready. Sometimes he is overconfident too early in the game,and gets a wound or so to teach him patience. He finally overcomes whatever version of dragon is facing him,reaching within himself and finding strengths and skills he did not believe resided within. Once that challenge is over he returns to the world he had forsaken with boons as was said. Every single one of these elements is to be found in The Matrix.

The core skeleton story is as follows. Anderson is a young geek in the late 90s living a near vegetable life as a programming drone for a multinational software-programming outfit. He is competent,but sulkily disgruntled about something he knows not what. His rebellion takes the form of childishly working as a hacker and writer of pirate and illegal software during his nights,going under the name Neo. He is also in constant contact with a fellow hacker known as Trinity who is wont to send odd e-mail messages like "What is the Matrix?" He runs into this riddler at a spooky nightclub and it turns out that Trinity is a very beautiful woman. She tells him that "The Truth is out there" and since she is very beautiful he thinks there may be something to it.

Neo suddenly finds a lot of nasty types chasing him and injecting him with bugs,literally at that. Trinity and her friends help him to escape and he meets up with a legendary Morpheus who tells him it is time he learnt the truth about the world and the explanation for why he feels odd all the time. Apparently all that he sees and hears is merely the mother of all high-tech illusions. It is actually a thousand years into the future now. All humans have been plugged into an interactive programme called the Matrix,which simulates ordinary life,but the truth is that they are actually being harvested by machines as bioelectrical sources of energy. Neo snaps out of his egg-pod and is patiently reconstructed physically by the Team of Morpheus and his space ship the Nebuchadnezzar.

He begins his training,which includes some nifty fight scenes, but they are not martial arts by the way. He is slow to believe in his destiny,that he is the one who will lead humankind to victory in the fight against the machines. Even an Oracle that he meets cannot cure him of this skepticism. When the leader is kidnapped by the agents of the Machines, Neo makes his choice to accept his destiny and rescue Morpheus. This principally consists in shooting about a million bullets through a variety of state of the art assault weapons. He also discovers that he can stop bullets in mid-flight and literally smash the hitherto invulnerable Agents into smithereens. Once the rescue is over he begins to recruit new people from the Matrix as he was once recruited.

Let us take up some of the more interesting features of the film. The first is the issue of Trinity. The woman is always the arouser of the creative spark in the man. She is Prakriti, Nature,and when she passes by,the man suddenly realizes that there are many areas to his life that need urgent expression. The stimulus of the woman energy alone makes the man dare to outdo himself. She is actually an external representative of the woman within,the Anima, and unless that is faced and integrated within the self, the hero might as well stay at home. This anima or female-energy has an instinctive understanding and confidence in the destiny of the hero even before he begins to believe it himself. Which is the case with Trinity and Neo too. She is the very necessary arouser,but she cannot be the total guide that he requires. For that he needs a mentor,a Morpheus.

Morpheus is the old Greek god of sleep and our deepest insights about the self come in the form of dreams. Hence he is an archetypal choice for the role of mentor. The mentor is initially more competent and more powerful than the hero. That is because he lives in full awareness of what he is; he has in a sense self actualized,and does everything with the grace and power that comes from that. Hence the superb competence of Morpheus and the fumbling and bungling of Neo. Yet the mentor is not a fool and he realizes that the day this person comes into his own he will outstrip all of them. The "training" that Neo undergoes is actually a tunnel of regression where he goes back and within himself to find out what he is. It is primarily a process of psychological exploration. "Do you think any of this is real?" Yet if you do not get your psyche in order you will fail when the challenge confronts you. That is Neo falling when the attempts the jump across buildings. He is still defining himself in the old ways,by the old concepts and he is thus not able to leap across into the new and true.

The Agents are of course the dragons,forces of evil that have become impersonal and interchangeable,the stultifying banality of life and its petty little rules which is the Matrix. In fighting them and exposing their pretensions, in proving that they have no real power over him,except what he has in error granted them, Neo makes the leap into the complete transcendence of the self. The traitor is the ordinary man,secure in whatever delusion is fashionable and terrified that somebody might tear away the veil of delusion. This fear of losing ones certainty,and even more important one's illusions,drives people to cruel behavior.

When Neo finally accepts what he is,he is free,without limitations,a jivan mukta of sorts in fact. His idea to free Morpheus is typical Hero-audacity. "Nobody has done this before," say his skeptical ship mates. That is just the point. The hero is not necessarily stronger,or more intelligent or even more capable than the people around him. He is always however a creative force. The Hero is willing to try and do things that were simply not thought of before. This ability to open out new possibilities, to solve troubles with the unexpected solution is what makes him the Hero. He moves into new realms of human endeavor and makes it practical for all of us to follow. In a sense the Hero always ends up changing the world,for his legacy is that of a new paradigm. And then he goes back into the Matrix,to free others the way he has been freed.

In India the Matrix has yet another reason for its popularity other than its archetypal strengths. That is because the popular Indian belief in Maya (see our glossary) finds the Matrix to be the perfect example of it. Life is unreal and a conjob; one day you will wake up and find the truth. This is the popular understanding about Maya - and it is all wrong. Nevertheless it is a reality,even though it is not the truth. The Matrix was a very up-to-date version of the belief that the world is an illusion.

Though the film's power is primarily that of the mythic structure it is extremely well made from a cinematic point of view too. First time directors always go in for overkill with the detailing,but it is that sort of obsession with trifles that make perfection and perfection is no trifle. That's Michelangelo by the way. My favorite example from the movie is the matter of designer goggles. Now movie goggles are worn primarily so that people look debonair,zto add a dash of mystery and swaggering panache. Yet that cliché has been worked beautifully into the context of the movie until it becomes an integral part of the narrative. If you notice,it is only at the very end,for the climatic gunfight and the call to the new recruit before he takes off like Superman that Neo begins to wear shades when he enters the Matrix. All the other members of the ship Nebuchadnezzar wear their shades as soon as they come into the Matrix and so do the Agents. The reason is psychologically astute. The real world they all live in is a dark gloomy hell of eternal night. The artificial light of the Matrix is too bright for their eyes,which have adjusted to living in a gloomy half-light. When Neo has just emerged from the Matrix and makes his first trip back to meet the Oracle, or even when he is training in the Construct,his eyes are still habituated to the light of the Matrix. Once he has spent enough time in the real world his eyes too become weak and he needs protection against the glare. And of course,a dude in glares shooting off guns is way cool.

This sort of detailing is something we are never likely to see in India. The great gunfight is actually a sort of tribute to the cinematic idols of the Wachowski brothers. The dude-shades,black leather jackets and guns firing like there is no tomorrow is John Woo. The intercutting and general tone of the battle shows that they have spent many hours at that shrine for all young male filmmakers,Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. There is one pump-action shotgun that falls to the ground after a guard has been shot. From the time it leaves the hand in ultra slow motion to the time it actually hits concrete,the frames keep cutting back and forth to the rest of the ongoing fight. It is incredible and exactly the sort of elastic time narrative that the opening shootout of the Bunch established. The audience feels it is in the middle of an explosion,though the directors were careful not to make it as emotionally wrenching as Peckinpah,that would have got them a kiss of death X-rating. The core body of the fight has exactly 72 shots,which is also the exact number of shots used in Hitchcock's famous shower sequence in Psycho. As I said,they know who does good work and they are not coy about quoting it.

What would be really interesting about the two sequels that are being shot would be to see how the directors could evolve a distinctive language of their own. Now that they have strutted their stuff and proved that they are two very capable, intelligent and knowledgeable young men,they can easily ubergang. And that would be something worth watching too, perhaps even more than the Matrix.