The Matrix Fans 2007 forums

[vieome]

I guess we all have not talked matrix for awhile, but as the matrix of my life decends into the spreading darkness, I have been thinking about the matrix more then ever. One idea has being playing in my mind over and over again. That idea is that perhaps what the wachows did was use the cambell idea in the design of the matrix, so that the calling is made to reach out to the sensitive intuitive, inteligent viewers.

1) the call to adventure
The call to the viewers come with the trailer. The trailer shows pieces of the matrix, with actions sequences never seen before. Ending with the question.
What is the matrix?

2) refusal of the call
After watching the film, the potential, is left with a feeling that it is just a good film but a film non the less.
Perhaps maybe a promise to watch the film again


3) the crossing of the first threshold
After watching the film again and seeing something you had not seen before, the viewer decides to let his curiosity get the better of him and goes in search on the internet for matrix information.

4) rebirth
One of the first stops on the net, is possible the what is the matrix warner site, where the viewer is given
some great philophical articles on the matrix. So that his whole perspective on the film on life is changed.

5) the road of trials
What is the film asking of you, what is it inviting you to do? You are invited to know thy self, which is easy said then done. To question your beliefs.

6) the ultimate boon
While the matrix is just a film, you are left wondering if your world is the matrix, or like the matrix, you learned about cause and effect, how emotions control us, how one is not free with in the clasp of the matrix and only gets freedom when out of the control of the matrix.

7) refusal of the return
Once you see how your world is like the matrix and could be the matrix, it is hard to return to what was your normal life.

8) the magic flight
Soon you are using concepts of the matrix to give you power within your own life. In times of trouble, you tell yourself there is no spoon, and there is no spoon

9) master of two worlds
The matrix has you studying concepts from your old world, you learn about christianity, you learn about zen, hinduism, etc etc, and you learn about the computer generated dream world

10) freedom to live
for so long fate has being the ruler of your life, but now you take your destiny into your own hands.
You become the change you want to see in the world

So ultimatly the hero being called is you. The wachows invite you to see their idea of the world from perhaps the baudrillian perspective, and maybe or own personal beliefs before and after having taken your journey into the wonderful virtual world of the matrix.

Okay people it is abit rough but that is what has being playing on my mind. perhaps you can add, subtract, divide, critic what I have put forward.

Regards
vieome

[iLuvU2]

Critique?

Well how about this:

The reason that the Hero's Journey recurs in so many myths and stories through so many cultures and so many periods of time is because it reflects the way mankind perceives itself and its own journey.

[iLuvU2]

Here is something written quite a while ago that I can say is a second opinion on the matter:

"In a post-literate, post-industrial age, where the eyes of the Green Man glimmer not from decaying stonework but from a thousand CPU's, we crave a new mythology. The need for the mythos has not disappeared; as we amuse ourselves with the latest, the cutting edge, the novel, the space within us where our souls would take shelter echoes in vast emptiness. Anaesthetized, we slump in front of the television, pop in the DVD. Distanced -- no, cut off -- from the rituals of time (of harvest and the shifting of the seasons) and space (our conversations happening in virtual rooms, our communities of intention rather than circumstance or geography) we begin to dream it all again.

Follow the white rabbit...

Echoes of Jefferson Airplane, echoing Lewis Carroll, echoing the oldest of Stories, boys or girls innocently following a woodland creature into the heart of adventure. This time, the white rabbit is a tattoo on the shoulder of a mescaline inflamed punk-rock girl..

Wake up, Neo...

When The Wachowski Brothers (three upper case letters: that's the title that writer/directors Andy and Larry have bestowed upon themselves), fresh from the cult mafia-lesbian heatfest Bound, sprang The Matrix upon us, it was quickly looked upon as the latest new thing, a glimpse of the future of film, a kinetic, experimental thrill ride. Its aggressive storytelling and its brutal, often beautiful, violence brought it a large theatrical audience. Its stylistic influence was felt almost immediately, as the advertising world seized on the Wachowskis' stop-time film techniques, and many directors came to feel that their latest product suffered by not having a Matrix homage... The film was one of the early bestsellers of the then-fresh DVD format: special effects featurettes, Dolby sound and weblinks -- all making full use of the new medium. Lost in this forest of novelties, though, was a simple truth: The Matrix was not new. In fact, it is the oldest of Stories, brought back to life.

"The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation - initiation - return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth." - Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

As Prometheus defies the gods to bring fire to humanity, as the Buddha finds enlightenment, so too does Neo awaken... Keanu Reeves is the perfect digital-age everyman. Flat-featured and impassive, with a CRT glow to his pallid skin, Thomas Anderson is a cubicle drone, a programmer with a 'respected software company'. By night, Anderson is known as Neo, a freelance hacker for hire. Neo is obsessed with finding Morpheus, a legendary hacker long on the run from police forces around the world. When the call to adventure comes, as it does for all heroes, it comes literally: Neo's telephone rings. Within moments of screen-time, he is face to face with Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss in sleek back vinyl and leather), another hacker long missing who confides to Neo that what he has been seeking is real, that the Matrix exists...

The blue pill or the red pill?

Neo, as heroes do, denies the call, resists his destiny, falling instead into the hands of Agent Smith (Hugh Weaving), who tempts him with the erasure of his criminal record if only he'll walk away from the world that seems to be opening to him. Neo refuses, instead meeting again with Trinity. He is taken to meet Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne in hipster Zen master mode and an impressively tailored wardrobe), who offers him a choice: "You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe....You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

Welcome to the real world...

Rather than forcing Neo into an altered mental space, the red pill is a 'tracer', an electronic tracing device. The real world of The Matrix is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, ruled by intelligent machines who farm human beings for their electrical and thermal energy, necessary for the machines' continued survival. And the Matrix itself? The Matrix is everything you see around you, the world we assume to be real. As Morpheus explains, "The Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this." He taps a battery meaningfully. The red pill not only strips away Neo's illusions, it violently reunites his psyche with his physical body, previously imprisoned in an amniotic soup, fed intravenously on the liquefied remains of other human beings. Bread and circuses... Morpheus believes Neo will be their saviour, The One who can change the shape of the Matrix to his own will, who can work within the program to free humanity, to defeat the machines.

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." - Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Drawing from comic books, Westerns, science fiction novels and films, martial arts movies and cyberpunk culture, The Wachowski Brothers have tapped into the well-spring of mythology. Not derivative, though its influences and antecedents are obvious, The Matrix rings with the originality of the great Stories, the soul-burning power of an oft-repeated truth recast and new again. The mythic freight of The Matrix seems so obvious now, but perhaps that is a function of time, and of outside knowledge. Neo's story is not completely told in The Matrix. Two sequels (The Matrix Reload and The Matrix Revolutions) are expected in 2003. The Matrix, itself, stands as merely the first sequence of the mythic tale: separation.

From the initial call to adventure, Neo follows the early cyclic stages of the hero's development as per Campbell's schema in The Hero with A Thousand Faces (despite its -- and his -- shortcomings, The Hero remains essential reading for anyone interested in the mythopoeic arts). From his refusal of the call to the adoption of supernatural aid to his crossing of the threshold into the night world, the world of the adventure, all of the early stages are here. The film ends with Neo on a city street, moments before taking flight. That city street, so familiar to all of us in our quotidian lives is, in this case, the mythworld, the belly of the whale. The road of trials lies ahead.

[align=center]"One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We're interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. ... These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built civilizations, and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage..."
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth [/align]

Myths function as the mirror of the soul, holding up both our fears and our beliefs to narrative scrutiny, to examination at a remove. Who cannot relate to The Matrix? Who among us hasn't felt that there was more to the world than we could physically experience? The fears of the industrial age came upon us with the dark satanic mills, and the soulless depersonalization of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Upon first coining the term "cyberspace" 20 years ago, William Gibson in Neuromancer also posited the digital age dichotomy: are you meat, or are you Matrix? The Matrix is the mythological manifestation of that questioning, of those fears and doubts, the thousand and first face of the hero.

Wake up!
Welcome to the real world..."

I've taken the liberty to highlight certain parts of this thesis. The highlighted portions sort of give a hint as to where people like Dionysus, myself, and others before are (and were) coming from. But as is usually the case, because some haven't concerned themselves with the validity of what was being said, they simply assumed we were speaking out of our ass. Now that all the matrix boards that I know of have very little conversation left in them, I wonder if the posters who haven't figured it out, yet will ever. And if so, how will they look upon these earlier times? With embarassment or with regret? Both?

GL as we used to say

By the way, I'm posting the link to this on the Ultimate Matrix Guide thread.

[iLuvU2]

Here's another link that, if one enjoyed the last post, is another good read.

http://www.holmesonscreen.com/hero.htm

[vieome]

I get the whole cambell thing and it is a great thesis but what I was suggesting that by design the wachows were making the matrix a call to us, all call to humanity, inviting the viewer to be the heroe. To take the epic journey of self discovery, to gain insight in the ways of all religions, philosphy, and come to an understanding that all of mankind is one.

[iLuvU2]

I get the whole cambell thing

Do you get it?

[vieome]

I agree, it is a beautiful day

[iLuvU2]

You see, it's not so much about Campbell or even Wilbur for that matter. What the Hero's Journey does for you is it introduces you to a perspective that explores commonalities in very important places.

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/EDI ... 1002.shtml

Check it out.

[CaptPostMod]

If God became human (i.e., the hero myth). And then became God again. In that God is all minds, all minds would have gone through the same experience. That is why we all know the myth.

[iLuvU2]

And on that point how about another song?
It's been a long time since the last one.

If you can see if you can solve the mystery
The answer revolves around your history
So carefully, I drop this degree
Scientifically, and realistically (who is god?)

If you can see if you can solve the mystery
The answer revolves around your history
So carefully, I drop this degree
Scientifically, and realistically (who is god?)

In eternal blackness, in the midst of the darkest night
Proteins and minerals, exist within specks of light
Solids, liquids and gases, and sparks of light
Within infinite lengths and widths and depths and heights
No beginning or ending, the 7 dimensions
Enough space for more than a million words and inventions
To travel through time within enough room to be the womb
Of the most high’s great mind which he will soon
Make shine with intelligent elements in sight that he will gather
In the realms of relativity electricity struck matter
Energies explode he went below to keep releasin
Atoms by the millions, til the numbers increasin
Til it was burnin he kept returnin itself to the source
The hotter his thoughts it gave the center more force
He gave birth to the sun which would follow his laws
All caused by his mental intercourse, who is god?

If you can see if you can solve the mystery
The answer revolves around your history
So carefully, I drop this degree
Scientifically, and realistically (who is god?)

He began to explain his craft, the master in the attic
He dealt with measurements; his language was mathematics
His theoretical wisdom of the numerical system
The complete number 9, which means born or existed
He gave birth to all planets, inorganic, and organic
So you wouldn’t take it for granted
They rotated their own distance around the sun
And fully submit to the existence of 1
And each one was promised everlasting perfection
If each one keeps spinnin in the same direction
To the east, and each speak the motion of peace
And harmony, and each show devotion to teach
The universe is to come, the whole world must go according
Know your galaxies and mirages, stars start fallin
So stay in your orbit, maintain safe and sound
Like the planets, each cipher remains perfectly round

If you can see if you can solve the mystery
The answer revolves around your history
So carefully, I drop this degree
Scientifically, and realistically (who is god?)

From unconciousness, to conciousness
By acknowledging his wisdom his response was this
An understanding, which is the best part
He picked the third planet where new forms of life would start
He pursued, show and prove, every move in order
Back to the source he let off his resources in the water
Climb his climax, where the climate is at, high degrees
See he start to breathe deep in the darkest seas
And the plan is, to lay in the clays to form land
And expand, usin’ the same clays to form man
In his own image, our origin begins in the east
Culture rise to breed, with the powers of peace
Deal in equality nature’s policy is to be god
Build or destroy positively born life like allah
And each one was given everlasting perfection
If each one keep living in the same direction
And life was life, and love was love
We went according by the laws of the world above
They showed us physically, we could reach infinity
But mentally, through the centuries, we lost our identity
Life start and ending, we got trife and started sinning
Lost touch with the beginning now ciphers stop spinnin
And what was once easy became confused and hard
Which brings us back, to the mystic question, who is god?
Sixty-six trillion years since his face was shown
When the seventh angel appears, the mystery will be known
Check Revelation and Genesis, St. Luke and John
It even tells us we are gods in the holy qu’ran
Wisdom, strength and beauty, one of the meanings of god
G.o.d., you and me, gomars a dubar
Knowledge, wisdom, understanding, sun, moon, and star
Man, woman and child, and so is allah

If you can see if you can solve the mystery
The answer revolves around your history
So carefully, I drop this degree
Scientifically, and realistically (who is god?)

Bear witness to allah, gave birth to all
For allah was all, and therefore, life itself
And the universe gave birth to man
The universe was man, and man was the universe
And the universe was always existed
And existence was life
And life is allah
And allah had no beginning because he is what always was
Rakim allah, peace

Now who is god?

Mystery by Rakim

Happy anniversary, 7/7