gslife's review against another edition
2.0
This was a required textbook for a course, otherwise I can’t imagine myself paying for an analytical look at The Matrix.
The first third of Clover’s book is pretty good as he reviews a short history of turn-of-the-millennium media recognizing the transition from looking “into” a world to looking “around” a world. It’s A Wonderful Life give us a look at any small town in America in 1948, but The Godfather just three decades later is a specific world unknown to it’s viewers. How much more The Matrix when the characters literally inhabit a constructed world that disassembles throughout the series?
The second third of the book gets bogged down in an attempt to review the solipsistic references of the film, which culminates in the final third entirely embracing the idea that the movie is Marxist in worldview. (MATRIX = MARX + IT, as Clover argues as a high school paper might) A single paragraph dismisses the Christian references (Neo is “my savior, man”, dead and resurrected, the foretold hero) as a “misfortune”—seemingly as much for the fact that it’s difficult to reconcile a single hero to Marxist ideology as for the whiteness of the main cast member. (Keanu is born in Lebanon to a English mother and Chinese-Hawaiian-Portuguese father. Reducing him to skin tone seems to miss the point of his casting.)
The Matrix is infamous for the Wachowskis slipping in as many references to modern philosophy as possible. To focus on one as the answer is to play directly to their desire. The philosophy smorgasbord is the message. It’s McLuhan all the way down.
The first third of Clover’s book is pretty good as he reviews a short history of turn-of-the-millennium media recognizing the transition from looking “into” a world to looking “around” a world. It’s A Wonderful Life give us a look at any small town in America in 1948, but The Godfather just three decades later is a specific world unknown to it’s viewers. How much more The Matrix when the characters literally inhabit a constructed world that disassembles throughout the series?
The second third of the book gets bogged down in an attempt to review the solipsistic references of the film, which culminates in the final third entirely embracing the idea that the movie is Marxist in worldview. (MATRIX = MARX + IT, as Clover argues as a high school paper might) A single paragraph dismisses the Christian references (Neo is “my savior, man”, dead and resurrected, the foretold hero) as a “misfortune”—seemingly as much for the fact that it’s difficult to reconcile a single hero to Marxist ideology as for the whiteness of the main cast member. (Keanu is born in Lebanon to a English mother and Chinese-Hawaiian-Portuguese father. Reducing him to skin tone seems to miss the point of his casting.)
The Matrix is infamous for the Wachowskis slipping in as many references to modern philosophy as possible. To focus on one as the answer is to play directly to their desire. The philosophy smorgasbord is the message. It’s McLuhan all the way down.
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