Lana Wachowski
Matrix Resurrections

At ten years old, those poetic brawls, those metaphysical journeys, those pearls of wisdom from an oriental guru had absolute value for me. They were the confirmation, in essence, that the reality around me was not enough. That there had to be something more, that the exquisiteness of the illusion took nothing away from its cruelty. That it was permissible to dream that the world was a little different and a little better than this one, only to then discover that the "real reality" was much more raw and cold than the sweet daily hallucination.

At ten, I watched that movie dozens of times (I had the videocassette), so much so that 23 years later I find its individual lines, the individual shots, in this obscene fourth chapter of the saga. I see them again as precious pieces that appear shimmering in the filth of this new narrative. The metanarrative game may strike less savvy viewers, in truth, it is a pseudo-intellectual stratagem of sheer cunning that somehow rekindles memories, it has this indirect merit of taking me back there, to the end of the last century, when I knew nothing of the world but liked to think it wasn’t just what was presented to me. It was somehow consoling.

The unfoundedness of the concept of reality, déjà vus as system errors. The flavors? Sequences of electrical signals sent to our brain. Those are not things easily overcome. There are infinite possibilities that this reality is a simulation within other realities, and that’s fine. We could also be Sims in the hands of some sadistic deity, but that's not the point.

I am interested in comparing the man of today and the child of 1999. The ecstatic amazement, the mystical revelation for the child somehow correspond to the most trite banality for the adult. The matrix that claimed me as its own when I was little, committing me to the faith in the Wachowskis' postmodern good news, is disintegrated and pulverized today in the complete disillusionment that keeps me well away from the verbose whirlwinds and the useless meta-parallelisms of this new trap. Pretending to show us the disillusionment, the enlightening key of interpretation, Lana Wachowski is the first to want us trapped in the matrix of matrices, which is cinema as inauthentic and deceitful as this. Cinema as the persistence of doubt for its own sake, cinema as a denial of the cognitive value of art.

Being out of Matrix today for me means spitting on this useless nonsense, because in the end the existential and metaphysical vertigo has always been a good pretext to dignify what perhaps was not enough on its own. That is, the riddling of bullets, the Kung fu, the futuristic cities, the robotic squids. But the deceit was already evident in 2003, and today the attempt to reconstruct such a widely concluded scenario sounds like an immense contradiction to the logics of freedom and self-determination that the same director would like to promote. No, Lana. The first slavery, the first matrix we rebel against is this artless cinema, which even explicitly declares its total devotion to something extremely past, pretending some further interpretation which in truth is just empty onanism. Without ideas there is no freedom, without ideas we all remain trapped in Matrix.