A Liminal Post from The Matrix

So this is a 1am thought that may be expanded. I’ve not done writing for ages and this is a first draft that will probably never be redrafted.

One of the things that is fashionable in my algorithm is Liminal Spaces. Not really fashionable because the people who are on the ball have been doing this for years, but it is a thing of our time, the idea of being in a hotel lobby or room with no future or past, and it really does speak to something.

The reason that this popped into my head was because I was participating in a discussion (posting on a facebook group lol) about the very weird recent Matrix film. Believe it or not it has a cadre of dedicated fans.

For me, I didn’t hate it, but there is this interesting background behind it where the reality bleeds into the film, the ‘Simulcra and Simulcrum’ of the original films, the copy is more real than the original. Was the Matrix always rubbish? Did I really enjoy The Matrix in 1999, or did I just enjoy being 19?

In a nutshell the Wachowskis who wrote and directed the original films didn’t want to make a sequel, but since Warner Brothers owned it, they said that they would make a sequel with or without them, so one of them signed up and made a bizarre confusing sequel about the principal characters being old and not wanting to be in a sequel.

A lot of people, including me, felt very let down by the post-post-modernism of it, it seemed to be deliberately bad because we were idiots for wanting to see a 20 year old film trilogy revived and expecting to be 19 again and enjoy something that already happened do what we wanted it to. Especially in the context of The Matrix where the first film was about how they were all stuck in this artificial loop.

I guess the thought that I am dancing around is the fact that the original films were also about this sense of dislocation that has come to define ‘late capitalism’, so to feel nostalgia for a time that was already outside of time is kind of futile. My rebuke to that is ‘yes but, even in this time of no identity, there is still craft and beauty’. The Matrix is very much of the still present era even though it was officially in the ‘End of History’ era and not the ‘Too Much History’ era, but it does still stand out, not so much as a philosophy film, it was always a dumb film, but as an amazing piece of craftsmanship.

If you are reading this and didn’t come up in the 1990s, you will not know just how good the action in The Matrix was, a good comparison is the also excellent Die Hard with a Vengeance from a couple of years earlier. That film is like Matrix, plotted very well and very easy to watch, but when you look at the action, and it’s all of the older tropes of punch ups on trains and blowing up a real boat etc. And then Matrix is like a tech demo for ways to use super slow motion, steal from the Asians, and CGI in a clever way.

So in a way Matrix kind of escapes from it’s time through craft, it still looks like a film, as does Casablanca which was made in WW2, whereas Matrix 4 very much looks like something that was made in a specific time, the arse end of Donald Trump or the first year of Joe Biden, I can’t even remember anymore.

And that is kind of what I am thinking about with the idea of liminal. There is something positive and negative in it, I’m just going to go out on a limb to finish, liminal can be eternal. There is a scene in Matrix 2 where Neo is stuck in a train station and is not allowed on the train, and of course it is symbolic and even touches on that kind of surreal comedy where he runs out of the screen to the right and runs in on the left. It’s not easy and lazy to just not put things in a place, if you do it wrong it is just low effort.

That is the end of my ramble. I am going to apologise yet again for this being a bunch of thoughts rather than a coherent essay, if you made it this far, well done. Please leave a comment from your cream coloured PC with a huge monitor with a tiny screen that only has green and black

a/s/l?